RE: Rant: Giving up on XML

["John Rosberg" <jrosberg -at- interwoven -dot- com>]

At the risk of dating myself -- this sounds a bit like some grumbling I
heard when the department in which I labored was told to turn in their
IBM Selectrics and start using a Wang Word Processing system -- "I'm a
writer, not a mumble-mumble typesetter . . . . "

Ms Gelb's post is well taken -- the tools chosen should match the task
as well as is possible (if I were writing for an English audience, I'd
write "horse for courses" -- sorry the pet peeve thread has stuck in my
head).

All that said, I find myself just a little surprised that our industry
still does not have access to the simple-to-use, easily affordable,
end-to-end single-source tools for which many were searching ten years
ago . . . 

Thanks for putting up with my frustration, as we're involved in a search
by which we can improve our efficiency, and the lack of the above named
solution is frustrating -- when a vendor or colleague tells me to hire
my own IT department to assemble and maintain a publishing solution, and
they are not joking, I am gobsmacked.

rosberg
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Janice Gelb [mailto:janice -dot- gelb -at- sun -dot- com] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2007 4:16 PM
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Re: Rant: Giving up on XML

Gene Kim-Eng wrote:
> My point is, I'm not going to "learn XML and XML technology,"
> in order to write documents.  If I have to "learn" a "technology"
> instead of that technology evolving to support my needs, I'm 
> not likely to adopt it.  And neither are most other writers whose 
> companies grumble about why they need to have a copy of
> FrameMaker or Acrobat Pro instead of being able to work in
> Word and some open source PDF printer driver.
> 

This is not a valid comparison. Requiring
writers to write with tools that do not
support the type of documentation they need
to produce is not the same as saying that a
move to a structured tagged environment is
going to require some education in both the
tools and the paradigm shift necessary to
work successfully in that environment.

I certainly agree that companies should
carefully examine whether the benefits of
moving to a structured tagging language
and output tools are worth the upheaval
to their documentation staff. For small
companies with limited documentation sets,
the effort is probably not worth it. But
it sounds like you're saying that the effort
would never be worth it to you no matter
what the potential benefits might be to
your documentation.

-- Janice

***********************************************************
Janice Gelb          | The only connection Sun has with
janice -dot- gelb -at- sun -dot- com  | this message is the return address

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