New DocBook XSL 1.73.0 released!

The latest version of the DocBook XSL stylesheets, v1.73.0, has been released!

The .0 designator means this is the beta version, and should be tested. If no bugs are found with the new distribution, a .1 release will be issued shortly!.

Hopefully a new version of the namespace-aware stylesheets for processing DocBook v5.0 documents will be following soon. UPDATE: The 1.73.0 namespace-aware version is also available now!

The stylesheets can be downloaded from here.

Features in this release include:

This release includes important bug fixes and adds the following significant
feature changes:

New localizations and localization updates

    We added two new localizations: Latvian and Esperanto, and made updates to
    the Czech, Chinese Simplified, Mongolian, Serbian, Italian, and Ukrainian
    localizations.

ISO690 citation style for bibliography output.

    Set the bibliography.style parameter to iso690 to use ISO690 style.

New documentation for processing instructions (PI)

    The reference documentation that ships with the release now includes
    documentation on all PIs that you can use to control output from the
    stylesheets.

New profiling parameters for audience and wordsize

    You can now do profiling based on the values of the audience and wordsize
    attributes.

Changes to man-page output

    The manpages stylesheet now supports single-pass profiling and single-pass
    DocBook 5 namespace stripping (just as the HTML and FO stylesheets also
    do). Also, added handling for mediaobject & inlinemediaobject. (Each
    imagedata, audiodata, or videodata element within a mediaobject or inline
    mediaobject is now treated as a "notesource" and so handled in much the
    same way as links and annotation/alt/footnote are in manpages output.) And
    added the man.authors.section.enabled and man.copyright.section.enabled
    parameters to enable control over whether output includes auto-generated
    AUTHORS and COPYRIGHT sections.

Highlighting support for C

    The highlighting mechanism for generating syntax-highlighted code snippets
    in output now supports C code listings (along with Java, PHP, XSLT, and
    others).

Experimental docbook-xsl-update script

    We added an experimental docbook-xsl-update script, the purpose of which
    is to facilitate easy sync-up to the latest docbook-xsl snapshot (by means
    of rsync).

New DITA information resources

Bob Doyle has created several new DITA information resources:

• DITA News is a resource website and industry newsletter.
• DITA Blog - blogs about DITA
• DITA Wiki
• DITA infocenter - a searchable knowledgebase for DITA users
• DITA Users - helping authors get started with topic-oriented structured writing
• DITA Tutor - self paced and instructor led DITA tutorials and workshops

DITA News will also aggregate posts that use the tag DITA. Check 'em out!

Publishing Word docs direct to blog via Google Docs

Here's the first test:

OASIS DocBook SubCommittee for Publishers

Background

For more than a decade, DocBook has provided a structured markup vocabulary for hardware and software documentation. DocBook is now widely used in both commercial and Open Source environments. DocBook has a very broad element set, and applies to much more than just technical documentation. The DocBook TC is engaged in evolving the suite of DocBook specifications. The community benefits from having a standard, open, interchangeable vocabulary in which to write structured content. DocBook has been, and will continue to be, designed to satisfy this requirement.

The OASIS DocBook SubCommittee for Publishers is chartered to develop and maintain official variants of DocBook in support of the publishing industry. Specifically, the subcommittee will focus on schema and stylesheet customizations to support: periodicals as regularly published technical notes or journals, book publishing (such as business, legal, medical, and other non-technical domains), educational textbooks and other document types as appropriate for this industry.

Scope of Work

This subcommittee will submit additional enhancements back to the full DocBook standard as appropriate. The scope of this DocBook subcommittee is publishing industry content. Broadly, this includes books, journals and other related publications.

This effort will deliver on the following goals:

• Build official DocBook variants, based against the DocBook v5.0 schemas.

• Address issues and enhancement requests that have arisen from experience with real-world DocBook implementations.

• Add support for features specific to the publishing industry.

I can also link directly to the doc here: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcjvrqnt_3d7zv3w

With Blogger, your best option is Google Docs. If you have a gmail account, it should be pretty easy to set up:
http://betabloggerfordummies.blogspot.com/2006/12/google-docs-spreadsheets-in-your-blog.html

From my gmail account, I click on Documents.
then click Upload
From the upload page, I can browse to a Word doc and name it
Then in the Google Docs page, I can select Publish and set it up to Publish to my blog!

What I did on my summer vacation

This year has been a big home improvement year, and summer vacation was no different!

Over the 4th of July week I built a dog run (with about 4" of pea gravel at the base):

And we converted the boys' Train theme (complete with working train set around the top of the room) to a NASA theme.

We did have to buy the 4'x6' Shuttle for one wall, but the rest came out of my Lego/NASA/space collection and existing posters that the boys had. I did make the face for the clock on the wall, too, reusing the train clock they previously had. We also plan to get a futuristic bullet train to use with the existing track.

The last candidate release?

Norm Walsh has released DocBook v5.0CR5, which will (hopefully) be the last candidate release so we can get the official v5.0 ball rolling!

Please test this release thoroughly!

This release also incorporates recommendations on schema modularizations from the DocBook SubCommittee for Publishers. Much of the schema was already modularized, thanks to Norm's forward thinking and best practices.

Dealing with tokenize, atomic values and a for-each

I've been working on a little identity transform issue, where I needed to resolve some transclusions in an XML document. Some of the ref attributes in the doc also contained multiple space-separated values that needed to be processed separately.

After a few Googles and a great deal of hacking, I was able to process refs with a single attribute value. I Googled a bit more and found some help (including a great article from Bob DuCharme) to process the multiple values using the tokenize function in XSLT 2.0.

I kept running into an odd error though: "Cannot select a node here: the context item is an atomic value". I thought it was some kind of XPath issue, so tried a number of different hacks to get around the issue to no avail. Finally, I Googled on the error message and found the solution. Here's the code snippet that I used:

  <xsl:template match="widgetRef">
    <xsl:variable name="root" select="/"/>
    <xsl:variable name="widgetID" select="tokenize(@stuff, ' ')"/>
    <xsl:for-each select="$widgetID">
       <xsl:variable name="widgetNum" select="."/>
      <xsl:copy-of select="$root//widget[@id=$widgetNum]"/>
    </xsl:for-each>
  </xsl:template>

Hope this helps someone. It took me a while to discover that I needed to reset the context when using tokenize within a for-each.

Staking my Claim

Thanks to a post from Jeni Tennison, I found out about claimID and openID. I've created a claimID page here: http://claimid.com/shudson310. It's also cool that it sets up an hCard for you on the same page!

4.. 3.. 2.. 1.. Coming Home

Just watching the Live NASA TV broadcast of the shuttle landing at Edwards AFB while listening to "Major Tom" by Peter Shilling. The two media work well together! (This version with Apollo 13 is cool, too)

Earth below us
Drifting falling
Floating weightless
Coming home...

Come home safely, Atlantis!

UPDATE:Touchdown! Welcome home, Atlantis!

My new favorite Martini

I had the BEST martini ever at the Trinity (http://www.hobokentrinity.com/index.html) tonight.

It's called the Key Lime Martini, and contained: Stoli Vanil vodka, Malibu rum and lime juice. It tastes just like a slice of key lime pie!

I really liked the Celtic theme of the restaurant, which was also on Sinatra Drive, and had a great view of the Hudson... inside and outside ;-)

Hurricane-force winds and a new record low

Hurricane-force winds hit Colorado on Wednesday, though thankfully our house did not incur any damage. Denver 7 news reported:

Just above the surface, winds were equivalent to a Category 4 hurricane. The National Weather Service Doppler radar measured a 142 mph wind gust 2,000 feet above the town of Louisville at 10:20 p.m. Wednesday.

We've always joked about the Superior Wind Tunnel (since we used to live there), where there is a valley that flows from the foothills toward Louisville/Broomfield. This time we weren't kidding! There's a reason the National Wind Technology Center is nearby!

We also had frigid temperatures with the passage of the strong cold front. This from the National Weather Service:

AT 544 AM THE TEMPERATURE AT DENVER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT DROPPED TO 31 DEGREES. THIS SETS A NEW RECORD LOW FOR THIS DATE. THE OLD RECORD WAS 37 DEGREES SET IN 1974 AND PREVIOUS YEARS. THIS IS ALSO THE LATEST FREEZE ON RECORD AND ONLY THE THIRD TIME A TEMPERATURE OF 32 OR LOWER HAS BEEN RECORDED IN THE MONTH OF JUNE IN DENVER. THE PREVIOUS READINGS WERE 32 DEGREES IN 1919 AND 30 DEGREES IN 1951. RECORDS FOR DENVER GO BACK TO 1872.

Additional coverage on the storm can be found here: Denver 7 9 News

Walking with Tollers and Jack

One of the highlights of my day today was Addison's Walk at Magdalen College in Oxford. It was incredibly beautiful and filled with the scent of spring blossoms. The small stream flowing along the path was mesmerizing.

It was inspiring to walk on the same path that Tollers (J.R.R. Tolkien) and Jack (C.S. Lewis) discussed spiritual matters. I could just imagine my personal "Inklings" (Don and Cam) alongside me as well. Later we would also need to head to the Eagle and Child for a pint!

After Addison's Walk, I stayed for the Evensong service at the Magdalen College chapel. It was absolutely amazing! The voices of the choir were simply angelic and brought tears to my eyes. The Magnificat and Nunc dimittis were in a much more pleasing format than the Evensong I attended at Christ Church yesterday. I would highly recommend attending here (every night at 6pm!).

I'll post photos from my walk and one of the beautiful stained glass walls in the chapel soon...

UPDATE: Here is a link to my pictures from Magdalen College and Addison's Walk:
http://picasaweb.google.com/shudson310/MagdalenCollege

C.S. Lewis Tour in Oxford

I had a personalized 4+ hour tour with Ron Brind, founder of the C.S. Lewis Tour in Oxford today. In a word: Spectacular! Ron is a wealth of information, and provided the best opportunities for photos and even took a few for me so I could be in them!

If you get a chance to come to Oxford, this is a MUST SEE tour! Information on the tour can be found at: www.cslewistours.com or www.cslewistours.co.uk

One of the most memorable moments of the tour was seeing The Kilns (the home of C.S. Lewis) and the C.S. Lewis Nature Reserve, with the woods that inspired Narnia!

Seeing the home where J.R.R. Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings trilogy was also very cool, and of course, eating at the Eagle and Child pub where the Inklings met!

I'll post a link to my photos when I get them uploaded, and write a bit more too. I'm a bit worn out from a full day of touring! :-)

UPDATE: Here's a link to my pictures from the C.S. Lewis Tour:
http://picasaweb.google.com/shudson310/CSLewis
If you're planning a trip to the UK, make sure you allocate a day trip to Oxford and take this tour! It's absolutely worth it, and guide Ron Brind is extremely friendly and knowledgeable!

Evensong Highlight!

I was absolutely right about my previous post. It's all uphill from here!

I spent some time trying to orient myself in Oxford this afternoon. While taking in some of the breathtaking architecture, including the Radcliffe Camera and St. Mary the Virgin Church across from my hotel, I decided to try to find the location to meet my tourguide for my C.S. Lewis tour for tomorrow.

I turned the wrong direction from Cornmarket Street, and was blessed to find Christ Church. It just so happened that they were having Evensong service at 6pm, so I made a note of how I got there, and continued to try to find the Randolph.

I stumbled upon the Oxford Museum, and got to see some very cool Roman artifacts. By this time I was also a little hungry and got a recommendation and directions to The Nosebag for a quick Cream Tea (yummy scones, jam and clotted cream with tea) on my way to the Randolph.

After finding the Randolph, I decided to time my way back to the hotel so I could change into something nicer for the service. I then made my way back to Christ Church.

Truth be told, I'm not a Catholic or Anglican, so some of the ceremonial parts I was not at all familiar with. The contents of the Evensong Service, however, seemed to follow along with my beliefs, so it was not all that awkward. The choir was absolutely amazing, though the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis, were a bit discordant for my taste. All of the other choral pieces, especially the anthem, were amazing!

Even more so, the day had been filled with rain, but after the service, the heavens opened up and I was treated to a beautiful few hours of sunshine to continue exploring.

I eventually wound up at The Crown, where I had bangers and mash and a Worthington's Cream Ale. The Crown's claim to fame is:

Yet another Oxford pub with a literary connection, and they don’t come much more impressive than the big Bard himself. Apparently Shakespeare was fond of breaking his journey between Stratford-on-Avon and London by staying at the Crown Inn.

I'm hoping to eat at The Eagle and Child tomorrow!

I've got pictures posted here: http://picasaweb.google.com/shudson310/Oxford

Overall, a much better ending to my rough-starting day!

The BA Vomit Comet

Well, traveling to London has to be one of the lowlights of my trip. When Dawn and I traveled to Scotland last summer, we had issues with security (2 days after the big liquid scare) and got to go on board with only our wallets, and everything else checked.

This time, there was a guy in the centre section (I had the far window, thank God!) who got sick pulling away from the Denver terminal. I keep hoping it was motion sickness and not something catching! I think we had been moving for a grand total of about 1 minute, when this guy puked all over the seatback in front of him. Unfortunately, I had a direct line of sight. Everyone in the immediate vicinity turned a shade of green and looked away.

This poor sod proceeded to lose it about every 200 miles on the trip. On a 4300 mile trip, you do the math. Not a pretty picture. He must have gone through half a dozen air sick bags, and the flight was completely booked so no one could move! Every little turbulent air pocket sent him flying.

It was hard for all of us in the vicinity to get our in-flight meals down. This guy even decided he wanted to try to eat! Big mistake. The flight attendants should have nipped that idea in the bud.

I resorted to 2 Tylenol PMs, earplugs underneath my Bose noise reduction headsets, eye blinders, and classical music cranked to make sure I couldn't hear him.

He was still going when we pulled into the gate at Heathrow too. Nothing like having a captive audience...

Not meaning to rant, but this was by far the worst of my business travel horror stories to date. And I travel about every 3 weeks! I still love British Air and being in the U.K. The rest of the trip should be all uphill from here!

Oxford bound!

I'm headed to Oxford Saturday night to work on a Content Architecture for Wiley Blackwell! I'm very excited, though I will be gone on Mother's Day.

Happy Mother's Day, Dawn! I'll bring back something nice to make up for it. I promise!

I'll be posting pictures, as I'll have about a day and a half to work through the jetlag before my meetings

What my son wanted to do for his 9th birthday

Pinky: " Gee Brain, what do you want to do tonight?"
The Brain: "The same thing we do every night, Pinky - Try to take over the world!"

In case you missed the obscure Animaniacs reference, you might need to read about it on Wikipedia and then catch the episodes on DVD!

Connor wanted to go to the Apple Store for his birthday, so he could play with the new iBooks and his new favorite app: PhotoBooth! I was taking care of his sick sister outside the store, but he emailed me some of his favorites. The above had the caption: Evil Scientist by Connor H.

He hasn't even seen Pinky and the Brain, but maybe it's time... ;-)
Happy Birthday, my computer progeny and mad scientist!

Godspeed, Mr. Schirra

The world has lost another of the original Mercury seven. Walter "Wally" M. Schirra passed away at age 84.

More details are here:
http://www.space.com/news/cs_070503_schirra_obit.html

I never had the opportunity to meet "Wally" but have had the opportunity to tour the launch site, and have seen many of his space suits and flight suits at the Astronaut Hall of Fame, Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center, Marshall Space Center Museum, and the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum (both in D.C. and at Dulles).

I am still in awe of the achievements of that time and of great men like Wally Schirra. I hope we can kick off another era of space achievement in my lifetime.

Godspeed, Mr. Schirra!

Talisman Rome expansion!

Every year my friends and I gather for an annual Talisman tournament. Talisman is an adventure board game published by Games Workshop.

As part of the fun, we have created multiple expansions that are allowed in the tournament. My labor of love has been a Rome expansion, since I'm a huge Ancient Rome buff. It's now available for non-commercial use at Talisman Island, a fan site. Here's a link to a preview and the download.

Struck by Lightning!

In a good way! I just found this extension to Thunderbird (my preferred mail client):
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/.

From the project home:

Lightning brings the Sunbird calendar to the popular email client, Mozilla Thunderbird. Since it's an extension, Lightning is tightly integrated with Thunderbird, allowing it to easily perform email-related calendaring tasks.

I haven't had the best luck with Sunbird in the past, but Lightning works REALLY well! I can import my appointments from LookOut, er, OutLook, and can also view my Google Calendar in one interface that I always have open!

I voted for an RFE to make the calendar panes dockable, so I hope that feature gets incorporated soon. It's a terrific little extension, so I encourage you to check it out!

Welcome, Jeni!

Jeni Tennison has entered the blogosphere! Welcome, Jeni! Jeni and Michael Kay are my primary sources of XSLT wisdom, so I look forward to reading her posts!

Interoperability getting some attention!

We're getting some exposure on the Doc Standards Interoperability Framework now! Check out this entry on the Gilbane blog:
http://gilbane.com/blog/2007/04/dita_docbook_and_odf_interoper.html

Thanks to Jim for sending me the link...

SKYWARN at the OASIS Symposium

SWEET! Being a trained SKYWARN spotter and HAM operator, I was really impressed by the presentation from Michelle Raymond on the Emergency Management TC. During the presentation, she sent an alert to an OASIS demo web service that alerted many blackberries in the audience. Wish I had a subscription to that service :-)

The Emergency Data eXchange Language (EDXL) was described in detail, including the Common Alerting Progocal (CAP). NWS uses the CAP already today!

This may be one of the few times I will ever get to use the tags "Weather" and "OASIS" on the same blog post! :-)

Some interesting sites related to this include: http://www.esi911.com/esi/products/webeoc.shtml

Interoperability at OASIS Symposium 2007

I'm presenting this week at the OASIS Symposium in San Diego.

A very interesting theme has emerged in the morning sessions, which is that of interoperability. I find this very encouraging and other standards bodies should stand up and take notice!

Bob Sutor, VP of Open Source and Standards at IBM gave a very interesting keynote that included this theme. He gave a great example of ODF and how they are addressing accessibility and interoperability as part of the standard.

Another interesting tidbit from his preso was on how to measure the "openness" of a standard:

• Development - how was it developed, who got to play, who contributed, how much did they contribute?
• Maintenance – who is maintaining? How are RFEs handled? Errors? What happens after v1?
• Implementation – are there any roadblocks preventing open source? Can it be implemented?
• Acquisition – can you get a hold of the standard? Can you download for free? Many standards orgs are not that way! Can you afford it around the world?

Following Bob's keynote, another terrific presentation was given by Bob Stayton. Bob Stayton was talking about interoperability between DocBook and DITA. Bob primarily focused on a form of processing interoperability, where source DITA content is transformed to DocBook to take advantage of the DocBook publishing toolchain.

After Bob, I presented "A Doc Standards Interoperability Framework for DocBook, DITA, ODF and more!". I'll provide a link here when the slides are available online.

Overall, the talk was well received and I look forward to getting the proposed Document Standards Interoperability TC started at OASIS! I also had the pleasure of meeting Alex Wang, from the UOML TC, who has been very active on the docstandards-interop-discuss list at OASIS recently. I look forward to exchanging ideas about interoperability!

This is the first OASIS Symposium I've attended. Hats off to Patrick Gannon, Mary McRae, Jane Harnad and the other OASIS folks who've put this together. I'm quite pleased with the level of technical detail and expertise here at the Symposium.

I'm attending some presos on BPEL, BPM and SCA (Business Process Modeling and SOA Component Architectures) right now. Will blog additional detail later!

DocBook SC for Publishers wiki page is up!

For those interested in following our efforts on the SC, I've set up a page on the DocBook wiki:
http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/Publishers

Velocity DocBook Framework

Elliotte Rusty Harold pointed me to the Apache Velocity DocBook Framework at: http://velocity.apache.org/docbook/.

This looks pretty interesting and would be an easy way for folks to set up a multi-platform processing framework for DocBook. It uses the community stylesheet releases from sourceforge, but makes it easier to set up the rest of the toolchain.

Definitely worth giving it a test drive!

Welcome, James!

James Clark, the father of groff, sgmls, SP, DSSL, Jade, expat, XP, XT, TREX, XSLT, nXML mode, Relax, Jing, Trang, and best of all RelaxNG has entered the blogosphere! His blog is http://blog.jclark.com

James has started with an interesting proposal called TEDI (Type Expressions for Data Interchange, pronounced "Teddy").

James, please keep working on RelaxNG, too! For its elegance and ease of use, I love it! Remember: If you're not RelaxNG, you're working too hard!

Free Fallin'

To celebrate my friend, Lee Martin's, 30th birthday we went indoor skydiving on Saturday. We had both always wanted to go skydiving, but never had the opportunity. Thankfully, Lee's wife found SkyVenture (http://www.skyventurecolorado.com/)!

The indoor skydive was a very non-stress and fun environment. Our "freefall" lasted only 2 minutes per dive, but it was so much fun! An instructor was close by to give direction and correct any balance issues. He also did some tandem stunts to keep it lively.

With the indoor skydiving, you don't have to worry about chute failure or bugs in your teeth, either! We even got a DVD and flight certificate to commemorate the event. I highly recommend it.

Who ya gonna call?

I thought I might see these guys when I was in New York, but not in Colorado!

My family and I were driving home after lunch yesterday and saw a very unique Subaru Outback: it had hoses, beacon lights, dish and Ghostbuster logos everywhere! I found a few pictures on the 'net, and it's exactly what we saw: http://www.myspace.com/coghostbusters.

The guy driving looked a lot like Dan Akroyd, too! I'm still not sure if it is just a fan car, part of a fan film, or if these guys really do try to chase down paranormal activity...

Still, it made me want to listen to Ray Parker, Jr. for some reason... :-)

DocBook v5.0 CR3 already!

Norm Walsh is quick on the turnaround! Please give the latest candidate release of DocBook v5 a test drive and report any issues. You can download the schemas here: http://docbook.org/xml/5.0CR3/. There is also a set of stylesheets released that support v5.0 as well. You can find them here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=21935&package_id=219178

I was a bit of a "problem child" with my RFEs that are now included:

• RFE 1588693: Added an <acknowledgements> element, peer to <dedication>, replacing <ackno> which had only been available at the end of <article>.
• allow <info> in HTML tables.

You can specifically blame me for these. :-) I do think they will be quite useful enhancements.

DocBook SubCommittee for Publishers approved!

I am very pleased to announce the formation of a DocBook SubCommittee for Publishers was approved by the DocBook TC during yesterday's meeting. The charter as approved is a as follows:

OASIS DocBook SubCommittee for Publishers

Background

For more than a decade, DocBook has provided a structured markup vocabulary for hardware and software documentation. DocBook is now widely used in both commercial and Open Source environments. DocBook has a very broad element set, and applies to much more than just technical documentation. The DocBook TC is engaged in evolving the suite of DocBook specifications. The community benefits from having a standard, open, interchangeable vocabulary in which to write structured content. DocBook has been, and will continue to be, designed to satisfy this requirement.

The OASIS DocBook SubCommittee for Publishers is chartered to develop and maintain official variants of DocBook in support of the publishing industry. Specifically, the subcommittee will focus on schema and stylesheet customizations to support: periodicals as regularly published technical notes or journals, book publishing (such as business, legal, medical, and other non-technical domains), educational textbooks and other document types as appropriate for this industry.

Scope of Work

This subcommittee will submit additional enhancements back to the full DocBook standard as appropriate. The scope of this DocBook subcommittee is publishing industry content. Broadly, this includes books, journals and other related publications.

This effort will deliver on the following goals:

• Build official DocBook variants, based against the DocBook v5.0 schemas.
• Address issues and enhancement requests that have arisen from experience with real-world DocBook implementations.
• Add support for features specific to the publishing industry.

If you are a Publisher, and would like to be involved, please let me know! I have a good-size core group of about 8 folks at this point, but would be interested in all the industry expertise we can gather!

DocBook v5.0 CR2 released!

Hot off the press, courtesy of Norm Walsh! Please give the latest candidate release of DocBook v5 a test drive and report any issues. You can download the schemas here: http://docbook.org/xml/5.0CR2/. There is also a set of stylesheets released that support v5.0 as well. You can find them here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=21935&package_id=219178

Finding Love in New York

 

My wife and I celebrated our 11th anniversary in New York City this weekend! We still found love, too! :-)

This was her first time in the Big Apple, so I tried to take her to the top sights in two days: Madison Square Garden, Times Square, Broadway, The Disney Store, Trump Tower, Central Park, The Metropolitan Museum, Ground Zero at WTC, Battery Park, Staten Island and the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center. There's still so much to see, but we did catch "Mary Poppins" and "The Lion King", so I think we did rather well!

Dynamic Publishing with DITA

With DITA's modular, reusable information elements, you can not only publish across different formats and media - but also flexibly recombine information in almost any way you like.

Initial DITA implementations have focused primarily on publishing to pre-defined PDF, HTML and Help formats - basically static publishing with DITA. The real promise of DITA, however, lies in supporting dynamic, personalized content delivery.

At Flatirons Solutions, we've developed a very cool application on top of Mark Logic to enable this dynamic publishing. We've written a whitepaper about it here:
http://www.flatironssolutions.com/Downloads/Whitepaper_DCD_Using_DITA.pdf
This whitepaper defines a new publishing paradigm, which we will call dynamic content delivery. Dynamic delivery changes the rules, putting the reader in charge of what content is important and how it should be packaged. It transforms publishing to an audience of many to publishing to an "audience of one".

What's Inside:

• Static vs. Dynamic Publishing
• DITA: Dynamic Assembly of Topics
• A Scalable Approach to Dynamic Content Delivery
• A Complete DITA Publishing Solution
• Bottom Line Benefits

Rain in New York

Okay, this week, it's actually been snow and biting, cold wind.

The Rain I'm talking about is a great restaurant we went to yesterday. Our VP of Publishing Solutions and resident New York expert, consistently provides us with excellent dining recommendations when we are in the Big City.

Rain was no exception. It's an Asian Fusion restaurant with a great atmosphere, and great food. Website is here: http://rainrestaurant.com[Orange Beef Spicy Fried Rice]

Check it out!

He's also taken us to a great Cuban restaurant (named, "Cuba"), though I don't remember the location...[Mojitos!]

Another great recommendation is Jerry's: http://www.jerrysnyc.com. [Brick Roasted Chicken]

Tonight, I went by myself to the Brooklyn Diner on West 43rd. [Chicken Soup]

My lovely wife is flying in tomorrow, since I have to stay over for meetings next week as well and it's our 11th Anniversary! Can't wait to show her the sites!

DITA 1.1 open for public review!

From the announcement:

The OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) TC has recently approved the following specification set as a Committee Draft and approved the package for public review:

DITA v1.1

• DITA Version 1.1 Specification Overview
• DITA Architectural Specification v1.1
• DITA Language Specification v1.1
• DTDs
• Schemas

The public review starts today, 5 March 2007, and ends 4 May 2007. This is an open invitation to comment.

...

Comments may be submitted to the TC by any person through the use of the OASIS TC Comment Facility which can be located via the button marked "Send A Comment" at the top of that page, or directly at http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/comments/index.php?wg_abbrev=dita.

...

The specification document and related files are available here:

DITA Version 1.1 Specification Overview
http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/CD01/overview/overview.html

DITA Architectural Specification v1.1
XHTML: http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/CD01/archspec/archspec.html
PDF: http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/CD01/archspec/archspec.pdf
DITA: http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/CD01/archspec/archspec.zip

DITA Language Specification v1.1
XHTML: http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/CD01/langspec/ditaref-type.html
PDF: http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/CD01/langspec/ditaref-type.pdf
DITA: http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/CD01/langspec/langspec.zip

DTDs
http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/CD01/dtd/ditadtd.zip

Schemas
http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/CD01/schema/ditaschema.zip

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

XSLT 2.0, XQuery and XPath 2.0 now official!

It's official! XSLT 2.0, XQuery and XPath 2.0 are now full-fledged W3C Recommendations today.

XSLT 2.0 is da bomb! I'm still learning XQuery, but it pretty much rocks too. Now if we could just get more folks using RelaxNG, I'll be a happy camper!

DocBook XSL 1.72.0 released

The latest versions of the DocBook stylesheets have been released on sourceforge here. Included in this 1.72.0 release are the base docbook stylesheets, as well as docbook5 stylesheets.

The release notes can be found here, but essentially the highlights include:

• Automatic sorting of glossary entries

• WordML renamed to Roundtrip, OpenOffice support added

  Stylesheets for roundtrip conversion between documents in OpenOffice format (ODF) and DocBook XML have been added to the set of stylesheets that formerly had the collective title WordML, and that set of stylesheets has been renamed to Roundtrip to better reflect the actual scope and purpose of its contents.

  So the DocBook XSL Stylesheets now support roundtrip conversion (with certain limitations) of WordML, OpenOffice, and Apple Pages documents to and from DocBook XML.

• Including QandASet questions in TOCs
• Language identifier in man-page filenames and pathnames
• index.page.number.properties property set
• Crop marks in output from Antenna House XSL Formatter
• More string-substitution hooks in manpages output
• Moved verbatim properties to attribute-set
• enhanced simple.xlink template

• DocBook 5 compatibility

  Stylesheets now consistently support DocBook 5 attributes (such as xml:id). Also, DocBook 5 info elements are now checked along with other *info elements, and the use of name() function was replaced by local-name() so it also matches on DocBook 5 elements. These changes enable reusing the stylesheets with DocBook 5 documents with minimal fixup.

• HTML class attributes now handled in class.attribute mode
• arabic-indic numbering enabled in autolabels

As always, the .0 release is the test release. A follow-on .1 release should follow shortly if no errors are reported.

An XML editor for the masses

Tony DaSilva has written a very excellent and thorough review of XMLMind XXE at http://www.writersua.com/articles/xmlmind/index.html. It's a very good editor, and something you should consider if you belong to an authoring group that is new to structured markup.

Tony's review is very informative. Even though I've used the tool before, I still learned something new: interactive margins!

I've used the Standard Edition to test DocBook 5 customization layers, and it works like a champ! It's one of the few XML authoring tools that supports RelaxNG validation, too. Just try finding that support in Arbortext or XMetal!

The editor also supports DITA, though I've found it's map support a bit weak. I'm sure that will change over time.

For markup geeks and power users, I still recommend oXygen, but for authors, XMLMind is one of my new favorite choices!

Curriki and open eLearning

I ran across an interesting article in the February '07 issue of Popular Science about Curriki, a new website/organization set up by Scott McNealy to promote Open Source eLearning.

The site is: http://www.curriki.org

In March 2004, McNealy helped create the Global Education & Learning Community (GELC) to leverage open source to provide learning materials for everyone, anywhere. GELC was spun off in 2006 as an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit now known as Curriki - the Global Education & Learning Community.

The content is in a Wiki format, but interestingly enough:

it can take a Texbook Wiki document and convert it to a DocBook XML format suitable as a portable eBook, or a PDF file suitable for printing. It can also package assets into portable learning objects in the form of IMS/SCORM compliant content packages. It includes tools for configuring the transformation of assets (Form to form, like XML to PDF or ODF) and packaging of assets (For specific LMSs, or with specific metadata).

We've been working to address eLearning content structure as part of the OASIS DITA Learning Content subcommittee. We will definitely need to make sure these two efforts are compatible!

DocBook on Mac OS X

Eric Johnson posted a question to the DocBook list about using DocBook on a Mac. I hadn't really looked at this much, because my Mac is primarily for home use. Sure, I've used jEdit and oXygen on the Mac to edit XML, but that's about it.

Thanks to Google, I found Project:Omega DocBook-X. It's a project dedicated to DocBook on the OS X platform. There is a single .dmg file to download and install the necessary tools. You can get to the project home page at:
http://projectomega.org/subcat.php?lg=en&php=products_docbook.

There is also an interesting article on Processing and Managing DocBook XML Documents linked from the same page. I'll have to give it a try!

UPDATE: Sean Gilligan sent me a note that:

Project Omega has been dormant for years, and I wouldn't recommend it. (I was the last one to submit improvements on it and I gave up years ago.)

I've since rolled my own Apache Maven 1.x plugin, called maven-dbsuite-plugin which I've published in fairly rough form as Open Source on Java.net.

Star Tours turns 20!

I can't beleive Star Tours is twenty years old today! My first trip to Disneyland was when I was in 7th grade, and I remember waiting in line 2 hour to ride Star Tours. It is still as amazing today, as when I climbed aboard those many years ago.

Since then, I've been to DisneyWorld three times and returned to Disneyland with my family for the 50th anniversary celebration. I've been on Star Tours many times with my kids, and we all still love it!

My favorite is probably still at MGM in DisneyWorld because of the huge Endor forest and AT-AT outside.

There is a website set up to celebrate Star Tours. Check it out at: http://www.swstartours.net.

Standards Pecha-Kucha!

Dave Megginson posted that for XML 2007, they are considering a standards pecha-kucha!

Each standards committee will have 20 slides (at 20 seconds each) to give us a quick update on what they’ve been doing over 2007 and what to expect in 2008 — that will make it possible for attendees to learn a bit about a lot of standards in a relatively short time.

I think this is a tremendously good idea! I attended the vendor pecha-kucha night at XML 2006, and found it both entertaining and informative. Michael Smith provided the impetus to get the pecha-kucha night started. I hope he'll host again, as he did a great job.

The timing would definitely a challenge (20 seconds per slide), though I have never tried presenting in a pecha-kucha format. Standards efforts I'm currently involved with include:

• OASIS DocBook TC
• OASIS DITA TC
• OASIS DITA Learning Content subcommittee
• OASIS Doc Standards Interoperability forum
• OASIS DITA-S1000D Interoperability discussion list

Spectacular re-entry over Colorado

Several news choppers caught the re-entry of a Russian SL-4 rocket body on tape! You can see the incredible video clips here. Unfortunately, it happened before I got up. Once I saw it on the news, I was sure it wasn't a meteor, as it took too long to burn up on re-entry. Very cool!

Just call me Mercury Man

I've been trying to eat healthier over the past year, so I've been eating a lot of tuna. Specifically I've been eating the StarKist Lunch To-Go kits. These kits come with tuna, crackers, mayo, relish and a mint. I don't like mint, so I always toss them in my drawer.

So how much tuna did I eat? I counted 83 mints in my drawer! Considering I travel every third week, that's a fair amount of tuna.

I've been able to tell a difference in the tuna that is a "Product of Ecuador" and the "Product of Thailand". I much prefer the tuna from Ecuador. The Thailand ones taste metallic. Just call me Mercury Man.

Going into overtime!

The game wasn't supposed to be that close, but the game went into overtime. Guess we got our money's worth for New Years! Too bad the game ended the season for the Broncos. Hopefully we will have a better season in 2007.

Give me an "F-R-E-E-Z-I-N-G"!

This image is blurry because my hand is shaking from the cold! It's all because we wore regular shoes instead of snow boots. Wet socks for 4 hours is a good way to get chilled...

New Years Eve at the Broncos!

Dawn and I went to the Broncos game to celebrate our New Years Eve.

First Candidate for the Next Generation!

Norm Walsh has posted the first candidate release of DocBook v5.0! We are getting very close to releasing the next generation of the DocBook standard.

You can download the new schema from: http://docbook.org/xml/5.0CR1/

There are a few outstanding issues we will be voting on in January, including:

• The creation of a new generic container as a sibling to chapter, etc. vs. creating an acknowledgements element at the same level
• Allowing info in HTML tables (they are allowed in CALS and would be useful for metadata)
• Allowing task to be a sibling of section

Dreaming of a White Christmas

I'm dreaming of a White Christmas, and I'm going to get it! A massive storm has hit Colorado, and we have 25" so far as of 11pm. It's supposed to continue snowing until noon tomorrow, and the rate so far has been 1-2" per hour! Here are some pics:

Update: the snow is tapering off as of 9am on 12/21. Storm total: 26" with drifts to 4'!

The Proliferation of Social Bookmarking Sites

Do we have enough social bookmarking sites yet?!?

I am a frequent reader of Rich Burridge, who provided a Roller template for adding social bookmark links to your blog posts. I thought I'd give it a try on Blogger to see how it works, too. Here's the Blogger template if you want to do the same. Just add it at the bottom of your post template:

<div>
  Share and enjoy: 
  <a href="http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&Title=<$BlogItemTitle$>;Url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>" rel="external" title="Bookmark it with Blinklist"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-blinklist.png" width="16" height="16" alt="Bookmark it with Blinklist" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>" title="Submit to Bloglines"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-bloglines.png" height="16" width="16" alt="Submit to Bloglines"/></a>
  
  <a href="http://blogmarks.net/my/new.php?mini=1&simple=1&url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" rel="external" title="Bookmark it with Blogmarks"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-blogmarks.png" width="16" height="16" alt="Bookmark it with Blogmarks" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://co.mments.com/track?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" title="Track with co.mments"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-co.mments.gif" width="16" height="16" alt="Track with co.mments" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://del.icio.us/post?v=4;url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" rel="external" title="Bookmark it with Del.icio.us"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-delicious.png" width="16" height="16" alt="Bookmark it with Del.icio.us" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=3&url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" rel="external" title="Submit it to Digg"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-digg.png" width="16" height="16" alt="Submit it to Digg" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/edit.pl?new_url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&new_comment=<$BlogItemTitle$>&new_link_other=&linktype=Misc" title="Submit it to Fark"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-fark.png" height="16" width="16" alt="Submit it to Fark"/></a>
  
  <a href="http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?t=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&u=<$BlogItemTitle$>" rel="external" title="Bookmark it with Furl"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-furl.png" width="16" height="16" alt="Bookmark it with Furl" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://ma.gnolia.com/bookmarklet/add?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" rel="external" title="Bookmark it with Ma.gnolia"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-magnolia.png" width="16" height="16" alt="Bookmark it with Ma.gnolia" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://www.maple.nu/bookmarks/bookmarklet?bookmark%5Burl%5D=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&bookmark%5Bname%5D=<$BlogItemTitle$>" rel="external" title="Bookmark it with Maple"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-maple.png" width="16" height="16" alt="Bookmark it with Maple" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://www.newsvine.com/_tools/seed&save?u=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&h=<$BlogItemTitle$>" title="Bookmark it at NewsVine"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-newsvine.png" height="16" width="16" alt="Bookmark it at NewsVine"/></a>
  
  <a href="http://reddit.com/submit?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" title="Bookmark it at reddit.com"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-reddit.png" height="16" width="16" alt="Bookmark it at reddit.com"/></a>
  
  <a href="http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do?href=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" title="Bookmark it at Simpy.com"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-simpy.png" height="16" width="16" alt="Bookmark it at Simpy.com"/></a>
  
  <a href="http://www.spurl.net/spurl.php?v=3&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>&url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>" rel="external" title="Bookmark it with Spurl"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-spurl.png" width="16" height="16" alt="Bookmark it with Spurl" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://slashdot.org/bookmark.pl?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>" title="Submit it to slashdot"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-slashdot.jpg" width="16" height="16" alt="Submit it to slashdot" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://tailrank.com/share/?text=&link_href=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" title="Track with TailRank"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-tailrank.png" width="16" height="16" alt="Track with TailRank" /></a>
  
  <a href='http://technorati.com/search/$utilities.encode("<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>")' title="See who links to it via Technorati"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-technorati.png" alt="See who links to it via Technorati" height="16" width="16" /></a>
  
  <a href="http://wists.com/r.php?c=&r=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" title="Bookmark it with wists"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-wists.png" height="16" width="16" alt="Bookmark it with wists"/></a>
  
  <a href="http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/bookmarklet?u=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&t=<$BlogItemTitle$>" rel="external" title="Bookmark it with Yahoo! Bookmarklets"><img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-yahoo.png" width="16" height="16" alt="" /></a>
  
</div>

The question is, do we really need all of these social bookmarking sites? Seems like we have a lot of duplication of effort and proliferation of similar services...

One other cool feature, is that the new Blogger beta allows you to label posts, similar to the way Roller and MovableType let you categorize your posts. Originally, I had to use my tag cloud in del.icio.us to provide a similar categorizing scheme on Blogger.

New Discussion List: OASIS DITA S1000D Interoperability

I've kicked off a new discussion list at OASIS to address interoperability between S1000D and DITA!

The address of this list is:
dita-s1000d-discuss@lists.oasis-open.org

Anyone, including OASIS members and non-members, may subscribe to this list in order to discuss the merits and possibility of the proposed project. The list is now open, and can be joined by sending a message to:
dita-s1000d-discuss-subscribe@lists.oasis-open.org

Here is the official statement of scope:

DITA is an OASIS XML markup standard designed for topic-based authoring and re-use. It is also designed for interoperability, with a highly flexible specialization mechanism. For more information please see: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=dita

S1000D is also an XML markup standard designed for re-use. This standard is aimed primarily at civil and military equipment documentation. It is also focused on Data Modules and a Common Source Database. For more information please see: http://www.s1000d.org/

This discussion list is intended to facilitate an effort to graft S1000D type modules onto the DITA type hierarchy. The result would support content that's completely interoperable and provides a relatively good transform target (because of similar semantics and structure). This approach will have significant long-term benefits toward interoperability of content and authoring tools between the two standards.

Categories: DITA, S1000D, OASIS, standards, interoperability

Sing-Along Messiah

A friend of ours wanted to celebrate her birthday yesterday by getting a group together for a sing-along of Handel's "Messiah".

At the Boettcher Theater, the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, soloists and the audience held a “sing along” of Handel’s beloved masterpiece. We had a good mix: 2 Bass, 2 Soprano, and 3 Alto. We sat together for Part 1, since we wanted to enjoy the time together, instead of splitting up to sit by SATB sections. Cindy even brought full scores for everyone to sing from! The problem, is that we happened to pick the Tenor section. We had a very good, strong tenor right behind us, and the two of us Bass singers kept getting thrown off our parts.

For Parts 2 and 3, the two of us Bass singers moved to the Bass section. It was much easier to sing on key and at the right time! We had a great time, and even got to sing the Hallelujah Chorus twice, as an encore.

You can also attend and just listen, but singing was very fun. I would highly recommend this next year!

Categories: Music

Happy "Holly" Days!

We welcomed a new member of our family this weekend: Holly!

She's a Soft Coated Wheaten Terrier, and absolutely adorable.

We were planning to surprise the kids on Christmas Day with a puppy, but saw her this weekend and decided it would be better to go with a puppy we really liked early, rather than wait and have one not be available, or have no choice in the personality. Holly and our collie, Duncan, get along famously. They already run and play together.It's fun having a puppy again, except for a few accidents and waking up at 2am, she is very well behaved. I think she has made a great addition to the family. Merry Christmas and Happy "Holly" Days!

Categories: General

XML 2006: DocBook Dinner

We had a great time at the DocBook Dinner at XML 2006. Attendees included: Norm Walsh, Nancy Harrison, Gary Cornelius, Elliotte "Rusty" Harold, Michael Smith, Bob DuCharme, Liam Quin, Jean, Paul Downey, myself. (I think I'm missing at least two others, so please help me complete the list!).

UPDATE: Doh! Eliot Kimber was sitting right next to me, and we chatted quite a bit. Sorry, Eliot!

We dined at Legal Seafoods, and had quite the variety of topics to discuss!

XML 2006: Boston

The view from above. They put me on the 29th floor, so I had a very nice view!

Categories: XMLxml2006

If you're not RelaxNG, you are working too hard!

After reading Elliotte Rusty Harold and Tim Bray's blog entries, I'm glad I'm no longer in the minority!

I've been preaching the adoption of RelaxNG as your native schema format since Norm Walsh created the initial drafts of DocBook v5.0. It just makes sense. And for those of us who have always been more comfortable with DTD-like syntax, Relax NG Compact is definitely the way to go!

Long live RelaxNG, and down with XSD!

Categories: XML

DocBook from the DocBook Wiki!

This is way cool: Norm Walsh upgraded the DocBook Wiki to a newer version of Moin Moin. This upgrade now provides support to export DocBook! From Norm's blog entry:

Go to a page in the wiki and, click on the “More Actions:” pulldown, choose “Render as DocBook” and voilá DocBook source.

Thank you, Norm!

Categories: DocBook

Si tuvieras fe como un grano de mostaza

What did you do for Thanksgiving this year?

We decided as a family that we wanted to give because we have been so blessed already. We spent the week of Thanksgiving with a team of 45 people from Rock Creek Church on a mission with IFM to help the people of Juarez, Mexico (more pictures from the trip can be viewed here).

It is disturbing and amazing to see the living conditions of the people there.Many of them live in "pallet homes" made from shipping pallets, cardboard boxes, and any other material they can find. Water is delivered once a day for 10 pesos, and is stored in a plastic barrel at the corner of their property. Sometimes they have to sleep in their cars because the wind blows so hard, or because of the cold. Of course, you can also expect to see a fair amount of lice because of the unclean conditions. They were also heavily impacted by the extreme flooding earlier this summer.

Our schedule on the trip was very full: Saturday: travel by bus to the House of Cornelius base in Fabens, TX.

Sunday: indoor and outdoor mercados in Juarez, Mexico

Monday: food and ministry to the people of La Colonia Granjas del Desierto

Tuesday: food, medical, health fair and ministry to the people of La Colonia Granjas del Desierto

Wednesday: Brother Ray's Feeding Center in Juarez, Mexico (pictured is Jenny, Ray's widow)

Thursday: Thanksgiving and day of rest at House of Cornelius

Friday: ministry, puppets, tea party and Christmas gifts at an Orfanatorio (orphanage) near Colonia Granjas de Desierto

Saturday: leave for home

The scary part, is that they were relying on my Spanish to get us across the border for 4 of the days! (Yo hablo un poquito español!) We made it across each of the days, though.

Elvia, translated for us on two of the days. She is such a neat lady.

We made a great friend, Eric, who also works at the Feeding Center.

He taught us a great song:

Si tuvieras fe como un grano de mostaza, Eso lo dice El Señor

Si tuvieras fe como un grano de mostaza, Eso lo dice El Señor

Tú le dirías, a la montaña “muévete”, “muévete” Tú le dirías, a la montaña “muévete”, “muévete”

Y esa montaña se moverá, se moverá, se moverá Y esa montaña se moverá, se moverá, se moverá Y esa montaña se moverá, se moverá, se moverá Y esa montaña se moverá, se moverá, se moverá

Translated, it means "If you have faith like a grain of mustard, this says the Lord: If you say to the mountain, "Move", the mountain will move"

For me, this trip has been very moving indeed.

Categories: General

Another handy shortcut for DITA and Firefox

I posted about the custom DITA search engine and firefox plugin yesterday, but there's another very handy Firefox feature that I use regularly to get information on DITA (I use the same feature for DocBook as well).

In Firefox, create a new bookmark for http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.0/langspec/%s.html, and then give it a keyword (I used "dita"). Then you can type things like "dita topic" or "dita othermeta" into your address bar to go to the topic or othermeta language spec page!

Categories: DITA

DITA Search and Firefox plugin!

Since Chris Chiasson and David Cramer built custom search engines for DocBook, I thought it might be useful to create one for DITA, too! I frequently search the Language Specification, and it would also be handy to search the mailing archives. To that end, I present my custom Google Co-op search: DITA Search!

The DITA Search homepage is available here: http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=015401811188033694464%3Ahu_dvbft4pu

If you would like to have a search plugin for your browser, save the following as an xml file to your C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\profilename\searchplugins directory:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
  xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
  <ShortName>DITA Search</ShortName>
  <Description>Search DITA1.0 Language Specification, DITA Wiki, DITA Focus Area and more! </Description>
  <Contact>scottys.log@gmail.com</Contact>
  <Developer>Scott Hudson</Developer>
  <LongName>DITA Search</LongName>
  <SyndicationRight>open</SyndicationRight>
  <AdultContent>false</AdultContent>
  <Language>en-us</Language>
  <OutputEncoding>UTF-8</OutputEncoding>
  <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>

  <Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/custom?cx=015401811188033694464:hu_dvbft4pu&q={searchTerms}&sa=Search&cof=CX%3ADITA%2520Search%3BFORID%3A0&hl=en&client=google-coop" /> 
</OpenSearchDescription>

I've also created a DITA Documentation search (lang spec, toolkit, other official docs) here: http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=015401811188033694464%3Acm02go-4hv8

Here's the plugin code for DITA Documentation:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
  xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
  <ShortName>DITA Documentation</ShortName>
  <Description>Search DITA1.0 Language Specification, DITA OT, and other official docs.</Description>
  <Contact>scottys.log@gmail.com</Contact>
  <Developer>Scott Hudson</Developer>
  <LongName>DITA Official Documentation Search</LongName>
  <SyndicationRight>open</SyndicationRight>
  <AdultContent>false</AdultContent>
  <Language>en-us</Language>
  <OutputEncoding>UTF-8</OutputEncoding>
  <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>

  <Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=015401811188033694464%3Acm02go-4hv8&q={searchTerms}&sa=Search&cof=CX%3ADITA%2520Docs%3BFORID%3A0&hl=en&client=google-coop" /> 
</OpenSearchDescription>

Enjoy!

NOTE: you must change the & to &amp; in the Url template string...

Categories: DITA

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DocBook Search plugins for Firefox!

Chris Chiasson has created custom Google search engines for the DocBook-apps mailing list archives and the DocBook Official Documentation (including Norm's "DocBook:The Definitive Guide" and Bob's "DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide").

David Cramer then took them a step further and created Firefox search plugins for these pages! The plugins are available here: http://www.thingbag.net/docbook/. Very cool! Thanks guys!

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