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Subject:RE: RE: Interviewing "under the hood"? From:"Dick Margulis " <margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 23 Jun 2003 14:33:19 -0400
Sean,
If the question is how to get one piece of text output in two formats, as it often is, your approach makes eminent good sense. That's not the question I was asking, though.
Suppose you want to do true single-sourcing. A group of people contribute content on a variety of topics. The content is tagged as to type (not Is this a bullet item? but Is this a feature name?). The content is then available for any number of uses--a sales presentation in PowerPoint, a functional spec in Word, a trade show poster in Illustrator, marketing collateral in PageMaker--and when the original content changes (because the actual product features change), all those outputs can be updated automatically. That, as I see it, is the promise of single-sourcing and the promise of XML. I can look at a feature name in a PageMaker template and treat it as a bullet item. I can look at it in PowerPoint and treat it as a new slide title. I can look at it in an Illustrator file and pull in a graphic icon that is tagged to go with that item. (This is all hypothetical, of course; I don't think those particular programs could be easily coaxed to do any of these things.)
So that's the promise of what XML-type markup can eventually do for us. The drawback, as I see it, is that it doesn't have room for quite enough information to handle the conditional output expressions required by different conditions that obtain from page to page. But maybe I'm missing something. Maybe XML can accommodate that already and I just don't understand it well enough to realize that.
Dick
---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: Sean Brierley <seanb_us -at- yahoo -dot- com>
Reply-To: Sean Brierley <seanb_us -at- yahoo -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 11:19:47 -0700 (PDT)
>
>Hmmmm, print and XML? Print and HTML?
>
>How about this, create your content in some DTP
>software, set your pages any which way, and print that
>to PDF and convert that to XML/HTML.
>
>Use something like FrameMaker + WebWorks Publisher
>2003 (okay, XML is a stretch there) or FM _
>Scriptorium's DocFrame.
>
>That is, if print is important to you, are you sure
>XML is the correct starting point?
>
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