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Vol. 10, Issue 1

January 2008

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LEAD STORIES

	Why DITA? An Interview with Bob Doyle Exclusive interview with Bob Doyle; The man who helped invent video games, desktop publishing, and new tools to help you learn topic-based authoring
	Some Personal Observations on Electronic Medical Records (EMR) DCLnews Editorial by Mark Gross

OTHER NEWS
- What Happened to that Yellow Corner Piece with the Umlaut?
- DITA: Not Just Tech-Docs?
- So, What is a CMS, Really?
- "What's with the Post-it Flags";Content Management Before DITA

GREAT WEB SITES YOU'VE PROBABLY NEVER SEEN
- Linus Pauling's DNA Research Notes, and Much More

ASIDE ;-)
- Describing "Drag and Drop" to the Man on the Moon

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

FAVORITES
Popular articles from recent issues

EXTRA
Upcoming conferences

LEAD STORIES

Why DITA? An Interview with Bob Doyle
The Man Who Helped Invent Video Games, Desktop Publishing, and New Tools to Help you Learn Topic-Based Authoring
January 16, 2008: DCLnews
You may not know Bob Doyle by name, but you certainly know some things he's invented. Even if you weren't born yet when he came up with some of his ideas, they have changed the way you work and play. In 1978 Bob invented one of the first hand held electronic games, Merlin, featured on the cover of Newsweek magazine in 1978, and selling 5.5 million units in 1980, making it the biggest selling game of the year. In 1984 he invented the first desktop publishing software, MacPublisher. Later he developed Skybuilders, a web publishing tool that led to the first podcast in 2003. And many more. So we wondered why a guy like Bob Doyle, with a PhD in Astrophysics from Harvard University and so many successful innovations, would be so interested in DITA. So we asked him. Click for full article

Some Personal Observations on Electronic Medical Records (EMR)
January 16, 2008: DCLnews Editorial by Mark Gross
In an age when we download movies at will, store piles of personal records on our Blackberry devices, beam software to each other's Palms, and store truckloads of digital photos on some website "out there"-accessible from anywhere-it's frustrating that we aren't yet applying the same technology to medical records. Considering the advances in health care and diagnostic tools over the last several years, why is the way we handle medical records so slow in keeping up with other technologies? Click for full article

OTHER NEWS

What Happened to that Yellow Corner Piece with the Umlaut?
December 26, 2007: CMS Watch
Think your scanning and digitizing project is complicated? Try piecing together 600 million scanned images of torn-up bits of documents. That's what Berlin's Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology is doing with the remains of 15,000 documents torn apart by East Germany's State Secret Service when the Berlin Wall was crumbling. But the software they are using has a way of breaking this daunting task into smaller, more manageable, chunks by grouping pieces according to patterns in handwriting, color, paper texture, and ink color. When a group of related shreds is found the software pieces them together like a puzzle. Seems like this idea of document assembly is catching on in more ways than we imagined. And some lessons learned for your CMS implementation. Click for full article

Read the original Economist article.

DITA: Not Just Tech-Docs?
December 3, 2007: The Content Wrangler
Long thought of as only a standard for technical documentation, DITA is getting a second look as a way to standardize enterprise business documents such as marketing material, reports, faxes, memos, and other narrative documents. Organizations are seeing the advantages in using XML to publish these materials much in the same way they have seen the advantages for technical publications. Organizations want to "leverage the intellectual property that is currently locked within narrative documents," according to Michael Boses, co-chair (along with Ann Rockley) of a new OASIS sub-committee looking into new uses for DITA. Read how the committee intends to evaluate DITA for narrative business documents and who they want to get involved.
Click for full article

So, What is a CMS, Really?
November 24, 2007: Gagetopia.com
Confused by the sales pitches and explanations about all that your content management system should be? No wonder. The terms tossed around by vendors and experts run the gamut. IT professional and blogger, Deane Barker, outlines four aspects of content management you need to consider when figuring out your content management needs: content modeling, content creation and editing, content management, and content publishing. Read more to get a clear, brief understanding of all the aspects your CMS might need. Click for full article

"What's with the Post-it Flags"; Content Management Before DITA
2007: Nikon World Online
The desk of Lindsay Silverman, senior technical manager at Nikon, is stacked high with camera user manuals waving hundreds of colored flags at him. Why? "It's not a novel," he says. So they shouldn't be read like one. His method of reading manuals is like using DITA after the fact (only with lots of sticky notes and highlighters). What more proof do we need that people want personalized dynamic content delivered in chunks of information?
Click for full article

GREAT WEB SITES YOU'VE PROBABLY NEVER SEEN

Linus Pauling's DNA Research Notes, and Much More

This enormous online collection is a fascinating look into the mind of Linus Pauling, regarded by some as one of history's greatest scientific minds, and also known as one of history's greatest peace activists. It was brought to our attention by Chris Petersen, Faculty Research Assistant, The Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers. This archive contains original pages of Pauling's research notebooks, letters, photos, and correspondence, including a 1952 telegram from the US Secretary of State requesting he sign an affidavit stating he was not a member of the communist party.
Click to visit the online collection

Have an interesting digital archive you'd like to share? Contact us at digitalarchive@dclab.com.

ASIDE

Describing "Drag and Drop" to the Man on the Moon
August 27, 2007: peterme.com
If you had to find a way to describe scrolling, dragging, or selecting to someone who had never used a Graphical User Interface could you? That's what Macintosh had to do back in 1984 when they published their first Mac user manual. When everyone was still using glowing green and black DOS screens, Mac introduced the first drag and drop interface and the first concept of saving original content files to a disk. Take a look at how they did it. It seems to have worked out okay for them.
Click for full article

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

"And in the end it's not the years in your life that count. It is the life in your years." --Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the USA

FAVORITES

Popular articles from recent issues
January 16, 2008

How the Irish Government Tricked 6,500 Workers into Using XML, Without Their Knowing It
http://www.dclab.com/xml_authoring.asp

Making Friends with Your DITA-Unfriendly Documents
http://www.dclab.com/dita_topic.asp

Is XML a Prerequisite to a Content Management System (CMS)? A Point-Counterpoint Discussion
http://www.dclab.com/cms_xml.asp

Fully Automated Legacy Conversions to XML, and other Urban Myths: An Interview with Michael Gross, DCL's CTO
http://www.dclab.com/legacy_xml_conversion.asp

9.5 Secrets for Managing DITA XML Migration
http://www.dclab.com/xmlsecrets9.5.asp

EXTRA

Upcoming conferences

DIA EDM Visit the DCL Exhibit February 5-7, 2008, Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, Philadelphia, PA

Content Management Strategies/DITA North American Conference Visit the DCL Exhibit April 7-9, 2008, Hyatt Regency, Santa Clara, CA