RE: Current trends in Authoring Tools?

["Dan Dube" <ddube -at- doczone -dot- com>]

I was reading through this thread and finding it very interesting that a
long discussion on authoring tool trends had not once mentioned XML,
until this note from Geoff. (Thanks, Geoff.)

As a former technical writer and long-time proponent of standards-based
applications, I actually am quite glad to see the trend move back
towards a standards-based approach like XML that separates the content
from the format. There are so many advantages, but here are my top 4
favorites:

- Writers can focus on putting all of their efforts into the CONTENT,
without worrying about why tools like Word aren't formatting the page as
expected, or how to tweak the HTML or help output files. 

- Tool-specific "workarounds" and tool obsolescence no longer become
issues. In the 1980s, I was an Interleaf user. Proprietary, closed
architecture (sound familiar?) Migration to new tools upon the demise of
Interleaf was a painful experience. What if (theoretically) Adobe
decided to abandon FrameMaker? Many tech writers would face the similar
hurdle of migration...how do you replicate all of those cross-reference
links, for example?  In XML, the tool becomes secondary to the content
structure. You can use any tool that supports native XML authoring and
expect essentially similar behavior.

- XML facilitates single-source publishing to multiple output formats

- XML greatly reduces the overhead, expense, and turnaround time to
localize content into multiple languages

Just my (admittedly biased) opinion...
 
-Dan

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Dan Dube
Managing Director, US Operations
DocZone.com
 
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-----Original Message-----
From: Geoff Hart [mailto:ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca] 
Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2007 4:22 PM
To: TECHWR-L; Janice Gelb
Subject: Current trends in Authoring Tools?

Janice Gelb notes: <<I find it ironic that when I first got into the
biz, writers used coding to indicate to the typesetter where to change
fonts and so on. Then the WYSIWYG tools came out and everyone said
"Look, we can control the appearance ourselves and see our changes right
away! Coding is clunky and old-fashioned!" Then 15 years later, everyone
acted like it was a revolutionary trend: "Look!  
We can use coding and have non-proprietary document exchange!">>

Sadly, though not quite as ancient as Janice <gdrlh>, I'm well on my own
way to decrepitude: I can still remember manually tagging text in
AtariWriter, and later in IBM's Bookmaster. <g> I also loved the ability
to view codes in WordPerfect and manually fix up any formatting bugs,
and remember how appalled I was when I learned how bizarrely Word
encoded its text formats in .doc files.

I'm very much looking forward to open standards such as XML, though it's
appalling that Microsoft has once again tried to coopt the standards
process by introducing its own proprietary format when a perfectly good
standard already existed. Will we be able to manually edit the tags in
.docx? I hope so, but wouldn't bet on it.


----------------------------------------------------
-- Geoff Hart
ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca / geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com
www.geoff-hart.com
--------------------------------------------------
Coming soon:  _Effective onscreen editing_ (http://www.geoff-hart.com/
home/onscreen-book.htm)


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