So a number of client projects recently have me looking for certain info and tools. If you have some thoughts about any of these, please do get in touch or post a comment here.

In no particular order:

• Does anyone have experience with the XSL-FO stylesheets that have been created for previewing content encoded with the NLM article DTD? In addition, has anyone extended the stylesheets to work with the book tag set?


• In a related note, has anyone tried the Word 2007 add-in for the NLM DTD? Experiences? Good, bad, or indifferent? I also wonder if anyone has tried extending it to reflect customizations to the DTD/schema?


• Finally, I am looking to talk to users who have created DITA content with Microsoft Word, either one of the commercial add-ins like Content Mapper or a custom add-in.

Mary has blogged about our series of webinars with JustSystems on "Developing a Strategic Roadmap for Structured Content."

Today's first webinar provides an in-depth review of widely-adopted best practices for structured content, with a goal of enabling the attendees to become prepared to conduct a self-assessment of their own structured content practices. Today's webinar also unveils the interactive ROI blueprint for structured content that we developed in conjunction with JustSystems.

Downloaded it and installed it just now, and have been playing around. Strangely, the install didn't kick off automatically in Firefox, but it did in IE. Was this a moment of survival instinct on Firefox's part? Or is Google's install process slightly flawed?

And am I silly anthropomorphizing a browser? It must have something to do with that Firefox logo...

UPDATE: It's good. Very good. But I honestly don't ask much of a browser, except that it be fast and not crash. I have managed to crash it a couple of times, but both times when I was trying to make it my default browser and refused to let a setup.exe file run. Once I let it run, the default setting held and the browser did not crash.

The news is coming fast and furious. There are some concerns about the EULA, but Google seems to have addressed them. There seem to be some implications for advertisers, but I for one welcome strong pop-up blocking.

The multi-threaded aspect of Chrome is excellent. Mitch Wagner of Information Week explains it well:

Chrome is multithreaded, which means that if one tab is locked up, applications and pages run normally in other tabs. And Chrome has its own Task Manager, which looks a lot like the one built into Windows, and which gives separate information on the resource usage of each running tab, window, and plug-in.

I love this feature. I tend to run a lot of tabs, and lock up Firefox all the time. I then have to kill the one big process and start Firefox again. Firefox 3, on my Vista notebook, seems to need a lot of resources on start up. I've never timed it, but it seems to take more than a minute sometimes to start and allow me to enter the first address (I bring it up with a blank tab). I have found it very easy thus far to free up resources by closing a Chrome tab or three.

As someone who has been skeptical of Google's ability to develop anything of significance beyond the core search engine, I have to say I am impressed. Browsers should be lightweight and fast, and Google seems to have accomplished this.

Oh, and it supports SVG!

Over at Government Computer News, Shawn McCarthy offers some thoughts and suggestions.

Gene Gable has a detailed and thoughtful review of QuarkXpress 8 over at CreativePro.com.

For some research I am doing, I would like to talk to people who are using ETL tools for transforming large volumes of content. If you have some thoughts about this, please contact me.

I missed this, and I shouldn't have, but that is what a few weeks out of the office will do for you. It's significant for Quark's new DPS offering, and also bolsters their traditional QPS line, which has been re-architected to better support open development standards and XML. (I wrote an article about QPS for the Seybold Report, but it is behind their firewall.)

There are plenty of Quark skeptics out there (and I have been one of them), and it's clear that Quark has challenges. But they are also still a sizable company, and they have a talented management team that understands the enterprise publishing market. And while Adobe is formidable, Adobe also does not seem to want to put together integrated server offerings or to take on the services side of a service-intensive business. Meanwhile Quark does, with both QPS and DPS, and a growing list of service partnerships. Since we're convinced that enterprise publishing is an important market, the message here seems to be to not count Quark out yet.

Have you tried it yet? News here. My first search here. I guess there were technical difficulties yesterday.

Oh, it's pronounced "cool," but, old geezer that I am, I would have never guessed that on my own.

 
 
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.