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10, Issue 7 |
Summer 2008
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LEAD STORY
OVERHEARD ON THE WEB
Making the Business Case for DITA, The Unlikely Demise of
Adobe FrameMaker, and Finally, XSLT for MS Word
OTHER NEWS
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Rollable e-Books and Pocket MRI's:
Coming to a Pair of Jeans Near you
- A Household Word Takes on XML
- MIT's Top 10 Technologies to Change our Lives
GREAT WEB SITES YOU'VE LIKELY NOT SEEN
Don't Paint your Whole House Just to See What it Looks Like in Chartreuse
ASIDE
;-)
A Low-tech Solution to Thailand's Elephant Unemployment Problem
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
FAVORITES
Popular articles from recent issues
EXTRA
Upcoming conferences
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DITA/TechComm Conference
November 3-6, 2008 -- Raleigh, NC USA |
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Come join us for an "anti-conference," an event for real users with real technical needs, where we provide access to real experts with real answers.
In four highly-focused days this conference combines the technical ideas of DITA and XML with the publishing tools used for technical communications. So you'll get the solutions you need to publish faster, smarter, and better.
Stop wasting time struggling on your own. Come let our experts--and users who've been there--show you how!
Register now at http://www.brightpathsolutions.com/nobull and save up to $100 by using the discount code "DCLABS NEWS."
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LEAD
STORIES
Wyeth Pharmaceuticals & XML; Beyond compliance to smarter, faster, higher-quality document publishing: An interview with Bernie Coney
August 6, 2008: DCLNews
Don Bridges interviews Bernie Coney of Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and learns how one division of the company moved to a standard because they needed to meet regulatory compliance, but soon realized it also helped them achieve consistency, efficiency, and higher-quality documents. Now they are taking that message to senior folks at Wyeth to say that this technology not only offers compliance, but can also increase efficiency-and they have the data to prove it.
Click for full interview
OVERHEARD ON THE WEB
Making the Business Case for DITA, the Unlikely Demise of Adobe FrameMaker, and Finally, XSLT for MS Word
August 6, 2008: Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler
After a brief hiatus last month, The Content Wrangler is back with the dish on structured writing. Is DITA dead? Is FrameMaker defunct? Has MS Word actually survived the XML wars and emerged as a user-friendly XML authoring tool? It all started with an article by Scott calling on all DITA evangelists to promote use cases and real-world examples designed to help folks understand the DITA value proposition. The article has sparked an interesting conversation about whether DITA will-or should-survive, while at the same time the demise of FrameMaker is still being discussed. We should remind you that discussion has been raging for nearly ten years now. And good news for MS Word users, a company out of Canada has come up with a tool that leverages Word XML capabilities-no, really-and allows users to focus on creating content instead of becoming XML experts.
Click for full article
OTHER NEWS
Rollable e-Books and Pocket MRI's Coming to a Pair of Jeans Near you
July 6, 2008: The New York Times, July 10, 2008: Science Daily
Size (and convenience) matters when it comes to digital book readers, but what about medical equipment? We've seen before how "doctors' offices in a bag" can bring healthcare to remote villages in India. Two new pocket-sized gadgets may bring both health and pleasure. First, a new technology that might finally break the digital book reader market wide open. These new "paperbacks" literally fit in your Levi pocket and are flexible enough to flip through waiting for the subway. While at the same time, a working group in Sankt Ingbert, Germany has turned magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology into a pocket-sized mobile device. While this mobile MRI is used to study environmental change in Antarctic ice masses, imagine other near-future uses to scan and diagnosis conditions within the human body.
NY Times: Click for full article
Science Daily: Click for full article
A Household Word Takes on XML
August 2008
Google has everything already: most of the ad money, the most robust search capabilities, and a presence in over 150 countries. It has become a verb for gosh sakes. And now they want to take on XML? Well, not exactly, but they are causing quite a stir with whiny complaints like it's, "complicated to work" and it "creates large files that can slow application performance." So Google did what they usually do and developed their own data exchange format and made it open source. On some fronts it's expected to be picked up by developers and praised as the simple answer to XML we've all been waiting for. On others it's just a temporary distraction.
Read about it from the horse's mouth at the Google Open Source blog, or see what others are saying.
Click here for Google Open Source blog
More info...
MIT's Top 10 Technologies to Change our Lives
2008: Technology Review
From automated medical care and promises of "turning off" brain signals that cause depression and other disorders, to cheap renewable energy and a DVD that holds hundreds of movies, the scientists reviewing these technologies could be right about changing our lives-hopefully for the better. These are MIT's top ten picks for the most exciting technologies most likely to alter industries, fields of research, and even the way we live.
Click for full article
GREAT WEB SITES YOU'VE LIKELY NOT SEEN
Don't Paint your Whole House Just to See What it Looks Like in Chartreuse
Not sure what color to paint the shutters on your house or what color pillows to put in the guest room with that hideous floral comforter? Just click on the colors you want to "try" and this aggregate site pulls up a virtual palette of photos from flicker that match your selections. The more colors you select, the more vivid the images. Or combine search with tag terms to get some unique images limited only by your vocabulary. You can even upload your own image to see what else it compares to on the Web. We uploaded a photo of DCL president Mark Gross and got back images of everything from a fox to (a guy who looks like) William Shatner. It's all in the colors.
Try it yourself
ASIDE
A Low-tech Solution to Thailand's Elephant Unemployment Problem
June 30, 2008: The Christian Science Monitor
A 1989 ban on logging in the natural forests of Thailand left many working elephants to fend for themselves in the decimated wild they once helped log. Because the elephant is Thailand's national animal, efforts have been made to rescue the domesticated giants and give them a more natural habitat in which to live. But money to feed and care for a creature that eats 440 pounds of food a day can be hard to find. Enter Wanchai Asawawibulkij, who sees opportunity in the fact that 50 elephants eating 440 lbs of food per day also produce three tons of dung per day. Because that dung can be used to create a traditional Thai art form-handmade paper-which is sold to the tune of about 270K a year it can support both the elephants and the local villagers employed to make the paper.
Click for full article
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
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"It took me 17 years to get 3,000 hits in baseball. I did it
in one afternoon on the golf course."
-- Hank Aaron, legendary major league baseball player
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FAVORITES
Popular articles from recent issues
August 6, 2008
Structured Writing - it Liberates the Soul
(and Makes for Good DITA)
http://www.dclab.com/structured_writing_dita.asp
DocBook to DITA Conversion Automation -
Improving the Yield?
http://www.dclab.com/docbook_to_dita.asp
Striving for Success in DITA Conversion -
A Quick Reference
http://www.dclab.com/converting_to_dita.asp
XML is Golden, XML is the Only Solution,
and Other Debatable XML Assumptions
http://www.dclab.com/xml_assumptions.asp
EXTRA
Upcoming conferences
DCL will have a 'Best Practices for Conversion' display at the Best Practices Conference 2008, September 15-17, 2008, Inn and Spa at Loretto, Santa Fe, NM
DCL will be attending the XyUser Group Fall Conference 2008, September 21-24, 2008, FireSky Resort, Scottsdale, AZ
DCL will be exhibiting at the ATA e-Business Forum, October 21-23, 2008, InterContinental Hotels and Resorts, Budapest, Hungary
Don Bridges will be speaking on "Improving the migratability of your legacy content to DITA XML" at DITA/TECHCOMM Conference 2008, November 3-4, 2008, McKimmon Conference Center, Raleigh, NC
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DCLnews Staff
Publisher:
Mark Gross, President DCL
Editor:
Diane Wieland for
The Content Wrangler,
dmwiel@comcast.net
Data Conversion Laboratory, Inc.
61-18 190th St., 2nd Floor
Fresh Meadows, NY 11365
Telephone: 718-357-8700
Website: www.dclab.com
Editorial: dclnews@dclab.com
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Content Management Strategies/DITA North America 2010 Conference,
2010 ATA e-Business Forum,