Thought provoking Web 2.0 clip on YouTube

Very interesting clip. Check it out!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

Yahoo Pipe for DocBook

Bob DuCharme's post encouraged me to try out Yahoo Pipes. Here is the result:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/fAyFLqfG2xGDA47UE2_cUw

Yahoo Pipe for DITA

Bob DuCharme's post encouraged me to try out Yahoo Pipes. Here is the result:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/RJeKx6vG2xGLt4MEfOgC8A

DITA 1.1 approved as Committee Draft!

The OASIS DITA TC has unanimously approved DITA 1.1 as a Committee Draft. The announcement for start of public review from OASIS should come soon.

This is an important achievement, as it includes the long-anticipated bookmap and glossary specializations and the following new extensibility features to the DITA standard:

• A bookmap specialization for encoding book-specific information in a DITA map
• A glossentry specialization for glossary entries
• Indexing specializations for see, see-also, page ranges, and sort order
• Improvements to graphic scaling capability
• Improved short description flexibility through a new element
• Specialization support for new global attributes, such as conditional processing attributes
• Support for integration of existing content structures through the <foreign> element
• Support for new kinds of information and structures through the <data> and <unknown> elements
• Formalization of conditional processing profiles

I will send out the URL to the Architectural Spec and Language Reference when they are posted to the public review site.

Saxon 8.9 is out!

Michael Kay has released a new version of Saxon: 8.9

New features in this release include: compiling a query to Java source code, XInclude, and a Saxon specific Ant task.

Saxon is THE engine to use for XSLT in my opinion. Check it out!

Share this Link

Lars Trieloff has created a consolidated link sharing submission service at: http://sharethislink.org.

I've decided to consolidate the plethora of link submission icons and point to this service. See below! Thanks, Lars!

Interoperability Framework presentation at DITA West 2007

Jim Earley and I presented the Doc Standards Interoperability Framework at DITA West 2007 yesterday.

Despite the somewhat low turnout at the conference overall (especially given the number of DITA user groups and high tech companies in the Bay Area!), our attendees included several members of the DITA TC, including: Erik Hennum (keynote speaker at DITA West 2007), France Baril and Yas Etessam.

Erik spoke very favorably of our approach and had a number of technical-level questions during the Question and Answer time. France Baril had some concerns from a DITA purist perspective regarding what kind of content this would open up.

This approach opens up access to content that might have been difficult to integrate otherwise. To address France's concerns, while this framework enables non-DITA content to be brought into DITA topics, there is no reason that you cannot treat this as a "stub" to then provide additional enhancements according to DITA best practices. I think her main concern is that the content may not follow some of the key information architecture designs from DITA (it may be dirty DITA), but this approach does not prevent you from then "cleaning" the content up to purist DITA standards. It really is an enabling mechanism.

This "content enablement" and interoperability is especially important in partner, OEM and cross-organizational content relationships, not to mention the reality of mergers and acquisitions.

We will be posting our whitepaper and slides to the docstandards-interop-tech list and the Flatirons Solutions website shortly.

Thanks to all who attended!

UPDATE: I've posted a copy of our presentation to the Flatirons Solutions site here.

XML Block Party at DITA West 2007!

I'm at the DITA West 2007 conference this week. It has been great to meet some of my fellow DITA TC members in person, such as Yas Etessam, France Baril, Amber Swope, Kay Ethier, Kate Wilhelm and Erik Hennum.

The highlight of the conference, however, has to go to Mr. Paul Masalsky of EMC. He gave a very informative presentation on deploying DITA for the enterprise, but in the middle of the presentation, gave an XML Block Party rap for DITA. He had everyone in the room almost in tears! The rap was quite clever and he displayed a lot of bravery to add beat box to the mix.

while it may seem a bit demented, it's topic-oriented!

:-)

P.S. If you are around San Jose tomorrow, my colleague Jim Earley and I will be presenting our Doc Standards Interoperability Framework. Hope you can make it!

Does Interoperability Really Matter?

My colleague, Jim Earley, and think so! Come to DITA West 2007 and find out why.

Jim and I will be presenting on a Doc Standards Interoperability Framework for DITA, DocBook, ODF and more! Our innovative approach provides mappings between the more prevalent documentation standards without inventing a new XML grammar.

Learn about the similarities between many of the documentation standards, how to map content between them, and how to process content with maximum fidelity using this framework!

We will also be presenting this framework at Open Publish and the OASIS Symposium.

Hope to see you there!

Welcome to the blogosphere, Jim!

My colleague, Jim Earley, has started a blog at: http://jims-thoughtspot.blogspot.com/index.html.

Jim and I will be co-presenting on a "Document Standards Interoperability Framework for DITA, DocBook, ODF and more" at DITA 2007 West.

Jim is an outstanding guy, and fellow DocBook, DITA and XSLT nerd to boot!

Flatirons Solutions will also be giving a demo of our Dynamic Content Delivery Solution, built on Mark Logic. It's a very cool application, that I had the pleasure of working on.

If you are going to be in the San Jose area next week, you should really consider dropping by! Hope to see you there!

NYC Skyline from Liberty State Park