Re: Information Mapping

[Len Olszewski <saslpo -at- UNX -dot- SAS -dot- COM>]

In article <m0uwIWT-004AOqC -at- iquest -dot- net>, Tim Altom <taltom -at- IQUEST -dot- NET> writes:

[...]

|> Well, I have to confess to being confused. I'd always heard that among its
|> few virtues Info Mapping could count a relatively painless conversion
|> to/from SGML, because Info Mapping encourages you to disassociate each chunk
|> from its neighbors. This would seem to be a natural for SGML.

        It's easy to physically see the end product IM document and
        mentally associate each of the text chunks with an SGML DTD
        element (assuming you have a nicely formulated DTD with which
        you are familiar).  The problem comes in taking the electronic
        markup which produced the formatted table, and automatically
        mapping the text elements to SGML markup via a program. This is
        nasty.

|> Are you saying that most tools (Word comes to mind) have to resort to tables
|> to make IM work?

        I haven't dealt with info mapping for about 6 years, and there
        weren't any tools specifically devoted to creating IM documents
        back then. Most of the IM documents I've seen are lined pages
        with text in the cells of the grid and running heads identifying
        the type of info on the page. This is nothing more or less than
        a table. Table markup is ugly.  Converting table markup to a
        content-tagging system is hard. I know this from experience.

--
Len Olszewski           My opinions; you go get your own.
saslpo -at- unx -dot- sas -dot- com

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