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As far as I know, Help & Manual's XML is standards based, not proprietary (unlike Flare, which is "proprietary"). In other words, you can work with H&M XML files in any XML browser or tool which supports genuine XML.
-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+lporrello=illumina -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com [mailto:techwr-l-bounces+lporrello=illumina -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On Behalf Of kafkascampi
Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2011 11:22 AM
To: Chris Gooch; TECHWR-L Writing
Subject: Re: DITA useful for translation?
"Thanks, Bill, Bee. As far as I can tell the advantages of DITA for
translation that my project manager had heard about seem to be related to
the discipline of writing in a topic based way - which we intend to do
anyhow, regardless of underlying XML schema."
I'd also add that the portability of using an open standard such as DITA is
very appealing, versus a propietary XML format such as the Help & Manual
system you described. Of course, you could probably transform everything to
about any XML standard you want, once it's in XML. And I agree with Bill
upthread that DITA may be too much for your needs right now. We have adopted
it despite the relatively small size of our content, to take advantage of
reuse, and because semantic markup appealed to our nerdy natures in general
more than the syntactic Docbook approach. And, hopefully, it will serve us
well when I rule a vast empire of content that cringes before my every step.
Chris
On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 10:46 AM, Chris Gooch <chris -dot- gooch -at- rocketmail -dot- com>wrote:
>
> Thanks, Bill, Bee. As far as I can tell the advantages of DITA for
> translation that my project manager had heard about seem to be related to
> the discipline of writing in a topic based way - which we intend to do
> anyhow, regardless of underlying XML schema.
>
> cheers,
> Chris.
>
>
> Christopher Gooch,
> Sheffield, UK.
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