February 13, 2008

We're Moving!

Well, sort of.

What I am actually doing is launching a new blog and practice as part of the Gilbane Group (press release here and the new blog, XML Technologies and Content Strategies, here). The new blog and practice are collaborations with my long-time Gilbane colleagues Mary Laplante and Leonor Ciarlone.

As we launch the new blog at Gilbane, I am transitioning this one to a personal blog, much like the one I had before, A Thousand Furnished Rooms. I will be discussing writing, literature, baseball, and life, not necessarily in that order.

I have been at this blog thing for more than four years, and it has always been an evolution. I started with a technology blog, Ideas in Technology and Publishing, then started A Thousand Furnished Rooms. Somewhere in there I briefly had a politics blog (an ugly undertaking in a nasty little world). Also somewhere in there, I began blogging at Gilbane's primary blog, folded the politics blog (oh, happy day!) and combined Ideas in Technology and Publishing and A Thousand Furnished Rooms into this blog.

So now I evolve again. If you want to read about content management, XML, and publishing technologies and strategies, check out the new Gilbane blog (Atom feed here). If you want to hear about more nebulous topics, stick around here. You are more than welcome.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:37 PM

January 10, 2008

Contract Developer Needs: Moodle, Arbortext Editor

Two colleagues of mine are looking for some medium- to long-term help on projects.

One needs a Moodle developer. They would like to find someone to first do some quick consultation on whether their project is feasible to build with Moodle, and if so, they will then need help with creating the necessary extensions. The company is in greater Boston, and they would like the developer to be available to visit the office from time to time as the project progresses.

The other needs a developer who has experience customizing Arbortext Editor--developing DTDs or schemas, developing stylesheets, and supporting the overall implementation.

If you are experienced in either of these areas, please email me.


Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:15 PM

December 4, 2007

Meanwhile, Over at Gilbane...

Tomorrow, I will be part of a webinar, What Every Publisher Needs to Know About Content Management. It's being put on by Book Business Magazine and sponsored by Follett Digital Resources. Matt Steinmetz, Special Projects Editor for Book Business will be moderating, and I will be joined on the virtual dais by Jabin White, Vice President for Product Management at Silverchair.

I'm going to be presenting a market overview, offer some definitions, and discuss some recent and emerging trends. I'm going to leave most of the heavy lifting to Jabin, though. He is truly one of the smart guys in the business and an excellent presenter, and I am looking forward to hearing what he has to say.

You can go right to the registration page here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:40 PM

November 1, 2007

XForms and Rich Text Editing

Over at Developerworks, Steve Speicher and Andy Smith show some approaches for adding rich text editing controls to an XForms application.

By following some of the integration rules defined by XForms, XBL, and a rich text editor, the end result is a simple and powerful addition to the XForms set of controls. This can further enable the application of XForms in a variety of applications, such as blogs, e-mails, social networking sites, and more. These can then leverage the built-in capabilities of XForms for validation, XML submission, declarative programming, and more.
This kind of thinking reminds me of some of my early thinking about XForms in particular and XML-based forms in general. When does a form end and a text editor begin?

 

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:16 PM

August 31, 2007

DCL's DITA Test Drive

Over at The Content Wrangler, Scott Abel shares his enthusiasm for the "DITA Test Drive" offering from Data Conversion Labs.

Sometimes the sheer volume of information on the internet is overwhelming. Even with the help of Google Alerts and RSS feeds, it’s easy to miss interesting news. That’s likely the reason we failed to notice this especially interesting offer from the folks at Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL). It’s called the DITA Test Drive Challenge, a program that allows content-heavy organizations a shortcut to DITA. For $3000 (okay, $2995, technically), DCL will convert 500 pages of legacy content to DITA and perform a Content Reuse Analysis on 2500 pages of legacy content. Wow! That’s quite an offer. Why would you want to take advantage of this offer? Because there’s a dirty little secret in XML authoring land. It’s next to impossible to evaluate an XML authoring tool without actually using some of your own content in it. Testing an XML editor with your own content will help you avoid selecting the wrong authoring tool for your organization. Those who skip this step generally purchase software based on the opinions of others and sometimes after having downloaded a free trial version of the software (which is pretty useless without your own DTD and some real content).

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:39 PM

August 20, 2007

Unicode and Microsoft Internet Explorer

A scientific publishing client writes:

"We are making great progress converting all our documents to HTML (from SGML). One challenge we are facing is how to convert Unicode character entities into characters displayable in Internet Explorer. It appears that Netscape and Firefox work much better than IE in displaying Unicode. One option is to create glyphs for all of the non displayable characters; but, there are hundreds of them and that is not realistic for us.

Do you know how other publishers are handling the display of these special characters? If the characters appear in display equations, we are creating gifs. Our challenge is for those characters that appear in text, which are now displaying as boxes in IE. For example, the entity bsime is used for similar or equal to. Unicode represents this as ⋍ and it should display as ⋍ (Editor's note: you are seeing this if you viewing this in Firefox or Netscape!)

Are there plug ins or sites that have all the glyphs or does Microsoft have special setups, etc? We have the same question out to a few of our vendors to see if they can help as well. This has become the critical path for us."

Thoughts?

UPDATE:

I forgot to post this awhile ago. My colleague Marc Dashevsky worked with the client and they came up with the following:

In short, the problem is solely with Internet Explorer V6.x. The Mozilla-based browsers and Internet Explorer V7.x all display the same subset of Unicode. Following is a description of the testing.

He set up his system as follows:

* The font Arial Unicode MS was already installed on his system.
* He explicitly set, in Internet Explorer, Arial Unicode MS to be the Web Page Font (Tools->Internet Options->Fonts).
* He ensured that Internet Explorer, Firefox and Netscape were all using UTF-8 encoding.


He then visited a web page that lists many characters in ISO 8859-1.

Just as the client had experienced with with uncommon characters displayed in its HTML pages, on this page the Mozilla-based browsers and Internet Explorer V7 displayed many characters not displayed by Internet Explorer V6. All browsers successfully displayed all characters listed in the Latin Extended-A block. However when he got to characters in the Minimum European Subset (a.k.a. the Multilingual European Subset No. 2), Internet Explorer V6 displayed open rectangles while Mozilla browsers displayed appropriate glyphs. (An open rectangle means that Internet Explorer knows what character it has encountered, but it cannot find a glyph to display it.)

There clearly is some problem with Internet Explorer V6, and it is not likely that there is a work-around for it. Microsoft fixed the problem in V7 and he is certain they have no interest in retrofitting it to V6.

Marc's solution is to have everyone switch to Firefox.

Makes sense to me.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:32 PM

May 30, 2007

Impressions of Sem-Tech -07

I discovered a new blog today, Dr. Data Dictionary, which is written by Dan McCreary and is quite good, and he weighs in today with Impressions of Sem-Tech -07, where he presented a paper.

I just returned from the 2007 Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose California. It was a great conference and opened my mind to several new ideas. Well worth the time! The conference was held over four days and had over around 125 presentations including tutorials and research projects. There were almost 800 attendees... The Semantic Web gets the “Web 3.0” Label Most people at the conference have tried to embrace the idea that the semantic web will be adopting the popular culture label “Web 3.0”. The final straw was the Nov 2006 NYT article by John Markoff which set the blogosphere abuzz.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:38 AM | Comments (1)

Excel and XML

Since so much metadata, and even editorial content, is often produced in Microsoft Excel, shouldn't publishers consider using SpreadsheetML for long-term uses of Microsoft Excel? A tutorial over at Brian Jones' blog got me thinking about it. If you are interested in a more in-depth look at SpreadsheetML, start here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:25 AM

May 26, 2007

DITA for Small Groups

Are you a sole proprietor, sole documentation person, or part of a small doc group? Check out Lone-DITA.

Speaking of DITA, if you haven't already, you should check out DITA Storm, a browser-based DITA editor.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:59 PM

May 21, 2007

Thinking about DITA vs S1000D?

Over at TheContentWrangler.com, Joel Amoussou has some thoughts:

The subject of interoperability between S1000D and the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) has received significant attention within the technical documentation community recently. This article discusses the following issues:

--Shall we create DITA specializations for S1000D data modules?
--How can we facilitate interoperability between DITA and S1000D, to enable round-tripping transforms for example?
--Is the DITA specialization mechanism the best way to make S1000D extensible?
--How can users leverage the strengths of both DITA and S1000D without introducing complexity?

As they say in the blogosphere, read the whole thing.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:31 PM

May 8, 2007

XML and Globalization

SDL Warns Businesses to Think Global When Migrating to XML

SDL, one of the big players in globalization solutions, announced today the findings of a research project into the use of XML in delivering global content across multiple channels. This is something I have written about for Gilbane (here and here), and I am very interested in best practices that will emerge as more and more companies use XML in producing content for global audiences.

SDL appropriately notes that the global implications of moving to XML must be considered up-front, and is providing seven "golden rules" at www.sdlglobalxml.com to ensure successful implementation of XML projects for communicating with global audiences:

  1. XML alone does not solve the issue of global content
  2. Think global from the start of your XML strategy
  3. Automate the process of managing higher volumes of smaller chunks, being sent more frequently for translation
  4. Ensure translators can visualize the context of XML chunks
  5. Optimize the structure of your XML for localization
  6. Protect your XML code during localization
  7. Ensure terminology and style are consistent across dispersed chunks

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:44 PM | Comments (2)

May 6, 2007

Meanwhile Over at Gilbane

I have been in one of those modes where I have been too busy to blog, and yet have been working on a lot of interesting things. My Gilbane colleague Mary Laplante and I did a webinar with Oracle (details here about where to view the recorded webinar and download the associated white paper). If you haven't been keeping a scorecard, Oracle acquired Stellent a few months ago, and while the webinar was more broadly about web content management, it does give you some insight into what Oracle will be doing with Stellent. Hat tip to David Guenette, who co-wrote the white paper, and really did the heavy lifting there.

Also at Gilbane, I wrote a case study about Autodesk and its efforts over the last several years integrating Idiom's globalization management system into its technical documentation workflow. We then did a Webinar with Minette Norman from Autodesk, and she did a fantastic job of explaining the project at both the technical and management level. The recorded webinar and presentation slides can be found here.

Finally, David Guenette and I recently updated a Gilbane white paper on Digital Asset Management. The paper, sponsored by DAM vendor ClearStory systems, asks (and answers) the question, has digital asset management “crossed the chasm” from a technology used only by early adopters to one that is more part of the IT mainstream?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:41 PM

April 28, 2007

MathML 3.0 Working Draft Published

Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 3.0: Working Draft

2007-04-27: The Math Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 3.0. MathML is an XML application for describing mathematical notation and capturing both its structure and content. The goal of MathML is to enable mathematics to be served, received, and processed on the World Wide Web, just as HTML has enabled this functionality for text.

In related news, the W3C has also published a MathML for CSS profile.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:33 PM

April 24, 2007

Multichannel Workflows in the Offing?

Over at the Really Strategies blog, Ed Stevenson comments on some print-CMS partnerships.

Last week, Lisa Bos posted on the fragmentation between different types of CMS.  Interestingly, this morning I stumbled upon two announcements on partnerships between companies in different CMS spaces:

Found on Gilbane, "Managing Editor Inc. (MEI) announced a joint development with Clickability to integrate the SoftCare K4 Publishing System with Clickability’s cmPublish."  So here we have an editorial and production system (or print CMS) integrating with a WebCMS.

And CMS Wire announces that Alfresco and WoodWing Software formed a partnership between WoodWing’s Smart Connection Enterprise editorial workflow system and the Alfresco 2.0 open source enterprise content management system. 

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:12 PM

April 2, 2007

Philly XML User Group

Philadelphia has an active XML user group, with monthly meetings in Center City. The next meeting is next Wednesday, April 11 at 6:00 p.m., at a new location for the group, Wolters Kluwer Health, 520 Walnut Street (the Penn Mutual building).

This month's meeting will feature a presentation, "RSuite CMS: Native XML Content Management," from Michael Puscar of Really Strategies, Inc. RSuite is the CMS developed by Really that uses the MarkLogic Server XML repository. According to the announcement for the event.

Publishers struggle with the same problems as they embark on their XML-based content management solutions. Current CMS solutions don’t offer true native XML management and search. Some call themselves “native XML databases” but they really support XQuery compilation and execution inside an existing RDBMS. This approach does not harness the power of XQuery, limits the use of hierarchical queries, and contributes to major performance issues later when you need to reconstitute XML data scattered across the database into a document for export. So what’s an appropriate definition for “native XML database”? And what does “native” really mean? Let’s discuss this concept and take a look at Really Strategies' RSuite CMS, which offers features like node-level XML management, layered metadata, and true content reuse.

You can register for the event here; it's free!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:44 AM

Currently Reading

One of the takeaways, er, giveaways from the Adobe Analyst Meetings last week was a nice little book, Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide. I read most of it on the train ride home (the narrative parts anyway, a chunk of it is reference), and it made sense, though I am not a Flex developer. Note that it is indeed specifically for Flex developers, and it is indeed a pocket guide.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:06 AM

March 21, 2007

And a Busy Year it Was

The 2006 Year in Review for DITA

by Don Day, Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
IBM Lead DITA Architect

The OASIS DITA standard:
The current standard is at DITA 1.0.  During 2006, committee work was focused on developing the proposed DITA 1.1 features (see "Roadmap for DITA development.). Just last month, the committee released a Public Review draft for DITA 1.1, which is expected to be approved later this year.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:35 PM

February 14, 2007

WS-AreYouEvenStillReadingThis

Writing for IBM developerWorks, Elliotte Rusty Harold offers Ten Predictions for XML in 2007. I've always liked Elliotte's work. When SGML was giving way to XML, Elliotte wrote the first good book about XML, and he has gone on to write several more. His XML in a Nutshell is the book I always recommend to people looking for a solid overview and authoritative first reference, so his predictions mean something. He weighs in on a number of topics you would expect to hear about (XQuery, XForms, open document formats), and some that are less well known (the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP)). But the thing that really caught my eye was his skepticism about Web Services. The money quote: "Enterprises have absorbed as much Web services machinery as they're able to stomach. Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and SOAP 1.2 are the end of the line. Many enterprises won't even get that far. WS-Choreography, WS-Transport, WS-Reliability, WS-Security, WS-Resource, WS-ServiceGroup, WS-BaseFaults, WS-Messaging, WS-KitchenSink, and WS-AreYouEvenStillReadingThis won't leave the station."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:47 AM

February 3, 2007

XForms Tutorial

New Orbeon Forms Tutorial

Hierarchical Menu

After lots of promises over the past few months, the new Orbeon Forms tutorial is finally available! You can read it online or get it with any recent builds of Orbeon Forms.

The tutorial specifically targets the upcoming Orbeon Forms 3.5, of which you can find nightly builds here. The tutorial covers:

Installing and configuring Orbeon Forms.


Understanding the simple XForms Hello application.


Building from scratch the Bookcast application, which allows you to keep track of the books you have read...

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:28 PM

January 9, 2007

A Companion to Digital Humanities

Landmark Digital Humanities Book Is Now Freely Available

A Companion to Digital Humanities is now freely available in digital form. This important 2004 book was edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. It includes chapters by such notable experts as Howard Besser, Greg Crane, Susan Hockey, …

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:10 PM

January 3, 2007

XForms for UBL

Micah Dubinko highlights a new XForms for UBL project at SourceForge.

The Universal Business Language (UBL) provides standard XML formats for business documents. This project is to provide XForms which allow creation, processing and editing of UBL documents and XLST stylesheets to generate such forms.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:02 PM

December 28, 2006

Speaking of My Resource Pages...

... I also spent some time updating my eForms resources page.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:36 PM

December 27, 2006

Goodbye 2006, Welcome 2007

Apoorv Durga says goodbye to 2006 and welcome to 2007 in the world of portals and content management.

2006 has been an exciting year for content technologies. Based on some of the interesting happenings, the following themes (in no particular order) have emerged that might have an impact on this space in coming years: Standards, or the lack of them was evident.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:00 AM

December 26, 2006

Two New IDPF Draft Specifications Available

Nick Bogarty of the Interational Digital Publishing Forum reports that two new specifications are available in working draft form and are ready for comment.The IDPF's Open eBook Publication Structure (OEBPS) Working Group has released two working draft specifications, the Open Publication Structure (OPS) 2.0 (internal working draft v0.7) and the Open Packaging Format (OPF) 2.0 (internal working draft v0.7) for public distribution and review as IDPF informational documents.

The IDPF strongly encourages feedback from potential users, developers and others, whether IDPF members or not, for the sake of improving interoperability and quality of IDPF work. The Working Group requests that comments to the specifications be made before Wednesday, January 31st in order to facilitate revision of the specifications. The specifications are available here (OPS 2.0) and here (OPF 2.0).

Feedback on the draft specifications should be made at the IDPF forums under "OPS/OPF 2.0 Public Drafts & Related Documents," and you can find a link to all IDPF specification documents here.

Document Summary

The OPS 2.0 and OPF 2.0 specifications are successors to OEBPS 1.2 which was released as an official IDPF specification in August 2002. The OPS specification describes a standard for representing the content of electronic publications. The OPF specification defines the mechanism by which the various components of an OPS publication are tied together and provides additional structure and semantics to the electronic publication. OPS/OPF will increase the viability and adoption of the previous OEBPS standard as both a cross-reading system interchange and production format as well as a final publication delivery format.

Both OPF and OPS are aligned with the OEBPS Container Format (OCF) specification which defines the standard mechanism by which all components of an electronic publication may be packaged together into a single archive for transmission, delivery and archival purposes. The OCF specification was released as an official IDPF specification on October 27th, 2006.

The OPS/OCF documents were submitted to the IDPF Board of Directors as an Informational Document as defined by the IDPF’s Policies and Procedures, section 4.6.1. While Informational Documents do not have an official specification status in the organization, the Working Group felt it important that IDPF members and the public have the opportunity to review the draft specification in order to obtain feedback on the current state of the proposal as well as to alert IDPF members that a proposal is forthcoming in order to allocate appropriate resources for a proper review. The document is expected to be submitted to the official IDPF output process in Q1 2007 which consists of Board of Director, public, intellectual property and membership review and a final membership vote.

This document was approved for submission by the Working Group on Thursday, December 14th and approved for release by the IDPF Board of Directors as an Informational Document on Friday, December 22nd.

The following documents may prove useful for introduction: the Working Group Charter, Specification Requirements, and IDPF member presentations on OPS, OPF & OCF.

Document Output Procedure

The OPS/OPF 2.0 documents are currently informational documents. All public comments made on the specification will be considered by the Working Group and, if appropriate, edits to the working drafts will be made. The Working Group expects to submit a final draft specification to the IDPF official output process in Q1 2007.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:06 PM | TrackBack

December 7, 2006

Get Your Multimedia House in Order

“Do opportunities exist to call for more digital offerings, and are you prepared to spend wisely toward them? Looking back five years or so, some publishers put the cart before the horse, burning holes in their pockets for expansive digital publishing before the market was really clear.

“For instance, publishers that think they would benefit most from e-books need to know that a market exists, but it is not as big [as they might think] and there are plenty of third-parties who could easily handle production and hosting. On the other hand, medical and legal publishers with enormous electronic potential absolutely need to make a commitment to a digital presence and they need to adjust staff to handle it."

Sound like good advice? I hope it is. I gave it.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:30 PM | TrackBack

November 22, 2006

Mixing MathML and SGML

Do you have any experience, or know of any instances, of mixing MathML within an SGML document instance? I have a client who is beginning the process of converting an extensive collection of SGML documents, and would like to go ahead and convert the equations first, into MathML, and then insert the equations back into the SGML document instances. One of their services providers is concerned about this. They are citing the SGML character entities in the current document instances versus the need--as they see it--to use Unicode in the MathML. However, as I read the MathML specification, you can still use SGML character entity references as long as you are using the MathML DTD and not the MathML XML Schema (see this section of the MathML recommendation).

Am I reading this correctly? Any experience with this?

I realize there are likely some other issues too, but this one came up in the first discussion...

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:41 PM | TrackBack

September 29, 2006

Speaking of DITA

I wrote an article about DITA for the magazine, Multilingual Computing. Unfortunately, the article is available by subscription only. (Also, unfortunately, I am having trouble reaching their site right now...) But I have four certificates entitling readers to a one-year subscription to the magazine. It's an excellent magazine. Email me with your contact information, and I will mail you one of the certificates. First come, first served.

UPDATE: Corrected "one-ear subscription" to "one-year subscription." No one wonder they have been going slowly! I still have a couple left, so e-mail me if you are interested.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:12 AM

DITA Open Toolkit Release 1.3

Release 1.3 of the DITA Open Toolkit is now available. I have written about the rapid adoption of DITA (for example, here and here). One of the big reasons for the rapid adoption is the toolkit, which provides users with, among other things, a ready means of publishing DITA-encoded content in common formats such as PDF and Help.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:51 AM

September 8, 2006

Here and There

Slow blogging lately, as I have been heads down with some work. But here are some things for your consideration.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:07 PM

August 31, 2006

Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows

Ron Gustavson writes with a great link, Scott Hanselman's 2006 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows. It includes all manner of tools, targeted at developers and super users, and has a very good section on XML tools.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:07 PM

August 29, 2006

XML Schema Book

Someone asked me to recommend a book about XML Schema, and I didn't hesitate to point to Priscilla Walmsley's fine book, Definitive XML Schema.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:44 PM

August 23, 2006

Eliot Kimber Meets MarkLogic

Eliot Kimber gets his first look at MarkLogic and likes what he sees.

UPDATE: Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg was relieved to find out that Eliot liked the software despite Eliot's blog subtitle, "All tooks suck. Some suck less than others."

NOTE: Yes, if you are reading closely, "Mark Logic" is the company but the product is called "MarkLogic Server." I have no idea why there is a space in the company name but no space in the product name.

WHICH REMINDS ME: If you are interested in exploring XQuery, Mark Logic's Stephen Buxton has co-authored an excellent book, Querying XML: XQuery, XPath, and SQL/XML in Context.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:42 AM | TrackBack

July 27, 2006

What is RDF?

Over at XML.com, Joshua Tauberer has updated a very useful article, "What is RDF."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:27 PM

July 26, 2006

IDPF OCF 1.0 Updated

According to an email I received today:

An updated version of the Open eBook Publication Structure Container Format (OCF) 1.0 specification has been posted on the IDPF website. The updates to the specification were made based on IDPF member and public comments received to date during the current IDPF Member and Public Review. The review period will end on Friday, August 4th. The IDPF strongly encourages feedback from potential users, developers and others, whether IDPF members or not, for the sake of improving the interoperability and quality of IDPF work. Feedback on the draft specification can be provided here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:55 PM

June 9, 2006

'Viper' Bites at Last

Writing for eWeek, Lisa Vaas has an early look at IBM's Viper upgrade to DB2 and its "breakthrough XML handling."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:56 PM

May 25, 2006

Reading the MadCap Tea Leaves

Over at Palimpsest, Sarah O'Keefe has some interesting speculation about the authoring tool MadCap software is developing. I like her idea for a new MadCap slogan, "Annoying Adobe since 2005."

Sarah's thoughts are a nice counterpoint to what I am saying over at Gilbane about Quark. MadCap is moving in on FrameMaker, an established and successful product that has languished under uninterested management at Adobe. Meanwhile, Adobe moved in on and overtook QuarkXPress, an established and successful product that languished under arrogant management at Quark. Obviously, there is no telling what MadCap's tool will be like--it is only an announcement--but the useful lesson from Quark's loss of market share is that no product is immune from competition.

(Well, maybe Microsoft Word is, but, then again, maybe not.)

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:43 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 18, 2006

XTech Conference Proceedings Online

Erik Bruchez has posted his X-Tech 2006 paper on XForms and Ajax. It's very readable and very good.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:04 PM

May 17, 2006

XSLT 2.0 vs. XQuery

Over at IBM's developerWorks, Benoit Marchal has an article, Comparing XSLT 2.0 and XQuery. Quoting briefly from the intro:

Since it was introduced in November 1999, I have found that XSLT, the XSL Transformations language, is one of the most useful (if not the most useful) tools you can use to manipulate XML documents. Many available APIs and tools work with XML documents from Java or other languages, and I have used many of them in different projects, but cannot recall an XML project that did not use at least some XSLT.

It should come as no surprise, then, that I have followed the development of XSLT 2.0 with great interest. XSLT is a powerful language, sophisticated enough to handle even the most complex manipulation, but it is also very verbose and that makes it more difficult to debug and maintain large stylesheets. The W3C hopes to address this, and other problems, when it releases two languages: XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0. This article compares the two upcoming languages and provides some pointers on how best to use them.

One of the great things about the Web, of course, is the abundance of technical information available in the clear and free of charge. I have always liked IBM's sites, in particular, though, because they seem to have the most vendor-neutral and useful content on important, emerging technologies.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:08 PM

InfoPath Client Not Needed Going Forward?

One of the email lists I read is the InfoPath group at Yahoo. A question came up about using SharePoint Forms as an alternative to InfoPath, since the current version of InfoPath requires the Windows client be present on each user's desktop. In response, Gray Knowlton, who indentified himself as a Senior Product Manager for InfoPath 2007, said the next version of SharePoint will "include InfoPath Forms Services, which will render InfoPath forms to browsers and html-enabled mobile devices, and this will not require InfoPath on the form fillers' desktop, nor will it require any advance download on the part of the person completing the form."

This sounds like good news to me, and significant.

UPDATE: XForms guru Micah Dubinko agrees that it is significant, but also asks a pertinent question.

FURTHER THOUGHT: I wonder what this evolution in InfoPath means for companies like SharePoint Forms, which "provide out-of-the-box web forms for SharePoint... and [allow] organizations to deploy powerful yet simple electronic forms solutions with SharePoint without the need to deploy InfoPath on every desktop." What does their value proposition become?

I opened comments and trackback on this entry in case anyone wants to weigh in.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:48 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 16, 2006

XTech 2006 Week

Allesandro Vernet is reporting from XTech 2006 Week in Amsterdam. He kindly alerted folks to an excellent presentation on XHTML2 and XForms given by Steven Pemberton. Check out the CSS Zen Garden examples.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:21 PM

May 15, 2006

7500 Words and Nothing's On

What happens when you write 7500 words about digitizing books without mentioning the words "markup" or "XML"? You get a breathless conclusion that, "the technology of search will transform isolated books into the universal library of all human knowledge."

Why do so many people who discuss this issue ignore the fact that there are better ways to develop digital text, and that the approach of Google, et al, could reasonably be judged to be mediocre at best? All you have to do is look at the average journal publisher today to see much better, more flexible, and more powerful ways to do this job.

And, by the way, this is old news. In fact, it is really old news.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:27 PM | TrackBack

April 15, 2006

XForms meets Ajax: Can they get along?

From eForms Reources: XForms meets Ajax: Can they get along?

The latest W3C release of XForms looks to complement Ajax, By Rich Seeley, News Writer, SearchWebServices.com. Appeared 21 Mar 2006.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:12 PM

April 2, 2006

Do Not Pass Go...

Apparently, a life of crime can lead you to XML!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:23 PM

support this blog