Re: XML Primer Re: TECHWR-L Premium Jobs, Events, and Announcements

Subject: Re: XML Primer Re: TECHWR-L Premium Jobs, Events, and Announcements
From: Lou Quillio <public -at- quillio -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 06 May 2005 15:10:14 -0400


eric -dot- dunn -at- ca -dot- transport -dot- bombardier -dot- com wrote:

The main point is that we don't know how the XML file will be used.

You sure? That may be true from a conceptual data design standpoint, but is a foreign concept to most documentation departments and many people implementing XML compliant systems.

Yeah, well, I suppose political mileage will vary, my brutha.

Actually, the renderer argument is bound to failure IMO if you're trying to explain the difference to a writer used to using style tags. They really don't care. Trying to make them care is a pointless and thankless task.

I have a diabolical master plan for this: take away their style keys. Give 'em the equivalent of Notepad, plus a simple pseudomarkup scheme, and tell 'em to Just Write.

We do this already at STC-TechValley.org. Contributors (and commenters) key their content into a textarea -- or paste it from whatever editor they're comfortable with. If they like, they can use Markdown notation, which produces well-formed XHTML no matter what. Lists, blockquotes, headings, whatever. The user can preview, and save, but what he'll see is his content with my styles. It's liberating for writers. Preview makes it gratifying. And it's automatically compliant for me, and the general Web.

Because we use a database-backed content management application with built-in versioning, taxonomy, and all manner of ACLs, there's limitless control.

With just a little more thinking and tweaking, such a web-based content system can work for local writing groups. Doesn't have to be on the Web.

Writers write without thinking about markup or styling: those are handled and modified centrally. They ultimately are anyhow, and it's much easier to work with raw, semantically-coherent content when it's time to pull it all together. And in the meantime, everybody (everybody with permissions, that is) gets to see nicely styled output as the project progresses, with no intervention from me.

And when management says the overall look should change, I get cracking ... on fully-abstracted CSS. Then it's all pulled into OO.o, massaged a little, and cranked-out to PDF with extendedPDF. Document over. And everyone's sOO.o happy!

[I'm a dreamer, baby, but this vertical toolchain will hunt. Might be a commercial product in it. Early wetirement. Any cwazy wabbits wanna work on it? The components are FOSS. Just takes brainwork and time, not money.]

LQ

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References:
Re: XML Primer Re: TECHWR-L Premium Jobs, Events, and Announcements: From: eric . dunn

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