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Single-source documentation (was TW and grad school -Reply)
Subject:Single-source documentation (was TW and grad school -Reply) From:Karen Kay <karen -at- WORDWRITE -dot- COM> Date:Wed, 11 Feb 1998 22:44:39 -0800
Linda K. Sherman said:
> The real problem as I see it--and maybe this is what people were trying
> to say--is formatting. The problem is not fundamentally content,
> audience, or anything else. Formatting that looks good in a book is
> rarely best for online viewing, searching, etc.--or vice versa. Since
> the vast majority of word processors, desktop publishing programs, and
> markup languages embed formatting information in the text itself, rather
> than embedding references to the text within the formatting information
> (which would allow you to modify one copy of the text while maintaining
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> two different sets of formatting information), this is a problem for
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> which I see no short-term resolution.
Um, er, you have most perfectly set forth the case for SGML!