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I am tempted...

 
 

... was announced yesterday, and is available now as a public beta. By all means, check it out. I have been playing with Buzzword, and like it. I did manage to break it trying an Export to Word 2003 XML, but it is a Beta after all.

I do wonder about the export choices, which, apart from Acrobat, zipped XML, and plain text, are all Microsoft--Word 2003, Word 2007, and Word 2003 XML. This makes perfect sense if Adobe sees Buzzword as the Web interface in a Microsoft-centric document workflow. But I can see other use cases, especially ones where the content is destined for a Web CMS (or is already in a Web CMS and is being updated. In these cases, the Web CMS would likely not want the overhead of the complex Microsoft file structures.

I think we are getting a briefing on Acrobat.com shortly. I will see what Adobe has in mind.

I've been intrigued by MadCap Software and their aggressive push into the documentation tools space. We just got an in-depth series of presentations on their products, and I certainly came away impressed. Mary Laplante is quoted in a related article over at EContent Magazine.

Click here to find out.

Cross-post from the Globalization blog.

At the end of March, the W3C announced the launch of the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Interest Group (IG) as a forum to foster a community of users that promotes the tag set's adoption and further development. Like Unicode's CLDR initiative, the emphasis on community interaction and collaboration underscores the ever-increasing, Web-driven impact of cooperative spirit.

As the Web nears its 20th birthday, we would imagine efforts such as ITS IG continue to be music to the ears of its inventor and W3C founder, Tim Berners-Lee. This particular interest group is certainly not the first nor the last of the educational and outreach efforts the W3C has launched since 1994.

It is also not the first nor the last of the activities from W3C's Internationalization (I18n) Activity, known worldwide as simply I18n. The mission? "To ensure that W3C's formats and protocols are usable worldwide in all languages and in all writing systems." The goals? Ensure universal access, support the internationalization and localization of documents, and help reduce the time and cost associated with internationalization and localization projects. Consistent and admirable objectives, described eloquently by Richard Ishida, Activity Lead for the I18n Core Working Group in his article, It's All About Customer Focus.

I18n accomplishments include a treasure trove of information from specifications and recommendations to educational materials to the newest initiative, hosting the Planet I18n Blog aggregator. Worth checking out; give yourself time to stay a while.

White papers on W3C standards in practice and component content management in practice are now available in the Gilbane white paper library.

Using XML and Databases: W3C Standards in Practice serves as a handy reference guide to the current status of the major XML standards.

Component Content Management in Practice: Meeting the Demands of the Most Complex Content Applications provides an overview of the requirements for technology that manages content at a granular level. To quote the executive summary:

[The paper] compares the requirements of component content management with the capabilities of more general content management technologies, notably web content management and document management. It then looks at the technology behind CCMS in depth, and concludes with example applications where CCMS can have the most impact on an enterprise.

No registration is required to read or download the papers.

Andy Updegrove is keeping a running tally over at Standards Blog.

UPDATE: Updegrove is now reporting OOXML will pass the vote, and Slashdot has a roundup that includes reports of irregularities in the voting.

Some news from the W3C:

The XSL Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Requirements Version 2.0. This document enumerates the collected requirements for a 2.0 version of XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO), not for XSLT. XSL-FO is widely deployed in industry and academia where multiple output forms (typically print and online) are needed from single source XML. It is used in many diverse applications and countries on a large number of implementations to create technical documentation, reports and contracts, terms and conditions, invoices and other forms processing, such as driver's licenses and postal forms. The XSL Working Group invites people to help prioritize the feature set of XSL 2.0 by completing a survey until the end of September 2008.

I talk to developers who have ideas about improving XLST. Now is your chance.


For those of you who follow structured FDA submissions such as RPS (Regulated Product Submissions) and SPL (Structured Product Labeling), you should be interested in XPortal.,a portal for preparing electronic submissions for the FDA. Under the direction of the FDA, GlobalSubmit has developed XForms that capture these submissions.

There's an interesting discussion about XML repositories going on over at the XQuery Talk mailing list at Stylus Studio's website. Also, if you are interested in XML repositories, the best publicly available deep-dive is over at Ron Bourret's site.

Jabin White from Silverchair was interviewing me the other day for their newsletter, and one of the questions was about which blogs I read. Of course, I read a lot--a quick count of my RSS reader shows me about 50 blogs under "content management" and "XML." I also have a few RSS feeds for vendor press releases (and a note to vendors--I vastly prefer RSS delivery of press releases over email delivery, so if you have an RSS feed, please email me).

I need to do some housework in my blog list. Out of those 50 or so blogs, at least 10 seem to be completely dormant, and a number are very rarely updated. But there are some I read regularly. These include:

Aside from blogs, I read XML.com of course, and Robin Cover's Cover Pages. (You have XML pretty much covered if you read these two things--and Gilbane.com of course!)

One other thing I do is use Google news and blog alerts, though sparingly, as you can really get overwhelmed. I get a daily Google Alert on XForms, for example, that is usually very good.

Note that I didn't mention email. I do get a lot of things in my inbox, and read some, but I spend more time pruning my email than I do reading it. I also periodically unsubscribe to email lists and then curse myself for joining them in the first place. I read a few yahoo groups regularly (notably dita-users, now 1824 members strong!), but use the browser interface for that more and more.

So that's my bag of tricks. Any thing else I should be reading?

  • XBRL International has announced their next conference, to be held this May in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. I wonder if they need a really smart XML analyst as a guest speaker. Actually, they are more than all set, as their keynote speakers include Christopher Cox, Chairman of the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, Gerrit Zalm, Chairman of the International. Accounting Standards Board Trustees, and Eddy Wymeersch, Chair of the Committee of European Securities Regulators. I believe that is what you call a critical mass.
  • In a related note, the SEC is moving apace with their Financial Explorer website we mentioned recently. Software engineers can now download the source code for Financial Explorer tools launched February 15. The source code download is available for free on the SEC Web site. I took a quick look at the zip file. It's ASP Classic JScript on the server side and client side Javascript. They list the dependencies as IIS 6.0, .NET 2.0, Javascript 1.5, and ASP Classic JScript 5.6.

Looking ahead to our conference in San Francisco, there are a number of sessions related to XML and content management, as well as some broader sessions on SaaS and content management platforms. David Guenette and I are working with Frank on the Content Technologies & Strategies (CTS) track as well as the Enterprise Publishing Technology (EPT) track. At this writing, we have the following sessions on tap (and you can see the whole grid here).

CTS-1: XML Strategies for Content Management

XML is fundamental to content management in two important ways--in how the content is tagged and structured and also in how content management systems interact with each other and with other enterprise applications. This session looks at how successful organizations make the best use of XML to support critical business processes and applications.

CTS-2: Enterprise Rights Management: Best Practices & Case Studies

As content management systems proliferate, so do the requirements for better and more sophisticated protection of that content. Simply stated, traditional protection is not enough--content needs to be protected persistently throughout complex business processes. Enterprise Rights Management platforms are answering these challenges, and this session uses case studies to help explain how this technology can help you meet your requirements.

CTS-3: SaaS - Is Software as a Service Right for You?

Software as a Service is exploding. Every day brings new offerings, new approaches, and new adopters. While content management SaaS offerings were once limited to Web Content Management, there are now SaaS offerings for document management, ECM, globalization, and XML-based component content management. This session looks at the big questions about SaaS and discusses whether SaaS might be right for you.

CTS-4: Platform Pros & Cons: SharePoint vs. Oracle vs. Documentum vs. IBM

The long-predicted content management platform wars are upon us. Activity is everywhere--the introduction of SharePoint 2007, Oracle's acquisition of Stellent, and EMC's continued aggressive acquisition strategy, and IBM's acquisition of Filenet. Will we all end up using one of these four platforms, and if we do, would this be a good thing? This session will offer the vendor, user, and industry perspective on this dominant issue.

CTS-5: Financial Content Collaboration with XBRL & RIXML

If you follow XML in the financial services arena, you undoubtedly know about XBRL, the emerging standard for financial data reporting that is really taking hold at the SEC and the regulatory agencies of EU countries. But a lesser known but equally intriguing standard is RIXML, the Research Information Exchange Markup Language. This session looks at these standards and the implications for the lifecycle of financial content.

EPT-1: Enterprise Publishing with XML (DITA)

June 2008 marks the third anniversary since DITA 1.0 was approved by the OASIS Technical Committee, and it is very safe to say that no XML-based publishing standard has had such rapid and far-ranging uptake. This session looks at some emerging uses of DITA while also discussing some of the positive business impact enjoyed by companies who have already adopted the standard.

EPT-2: Multi-Channel Publishing - How to Do It

Multi-channel publishing has become a mandate for nearly every organization. With the explosion in mobile devices, the mandate is becoming more complex. But along with this complexity comes opportunity to serve more users and more applications. This session offer case studies and practical advice for implementing multi-channel publishing to support your business objectives.

EPT-3: Digital Publishing Platforms: Magazines, Newspapers & eBooks

Amazon's Kindle may be getting all of the publicity, but there is an explosion in new devices, technologies, and products for digital publishing--with implications for every traditional publishing medium. What are these new technologies, and what opportunities do they present to publishers? Hear from publishers and technologists, as well as some of the results of the Gilbane Group's extensive research into how these technologies are reshaping the digital publishing landscape.