In a recent article entitled Let's Get Real: The Secret To Making The Case For DITA Adoption To The Rest of The World, I highlight the need for professional DITA evangelists to promote use cases and real-world examples designed to help folks understand the DITA value proposition. As is the case with nearly every XML standard, significant business benefits can be derived from successfully implementing the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). The business benefits are not always as obvious as we hope they would be, and significant effort is needed to help proponents of standards like DITA make the business case for change.

Folks in the trenches -- technical writers, trainers, information architects -- need information and tools to help them sell DITA upstream to management. Without meaningful information, it's difficult to sell a move as complex and demanding (and as potentially expensive) as moving to a topic-based architecture like DITA without use cases, success stories, return on investment calculations, etc. And, the folks that work for the standards body that maintains DITA -- the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) -- aren't making the kind of progress needed to catapult DITA into the mainstream. The widespread adoption of DITA will require folks with a demonstrated track record of getting attention to help move these ideas into the mainstream, where regular, ordinary business people can start to be exposed to ideas such as structured content, personalization, variable data, content reuse, syndication, and document engineering.

The article has sparked an interesting conversation among newbies and experienced content pros alike. Marcus Carr joined the discussion by saying he thinks the promotion of DITA is not the issue. "If technology is good," Carr writes, "it takes off - otherwise it doesn't. DITA hasn't, and my money is on it not lighting the information world on fire. Blogs and wikis are the model that we should be following - their success is undeniable... It should be as simple to create structured documentation as it is to create data in blogs and wikis."

Perhaps, but for now, my money is on structured XML content. The authoring environments may indeed involve web-based tools like wikis and blogs, several of which are now offering support for content standards like DITA.

The demise of Adobe FrameMaker, Part 20

For the last ten years, every 18 to 24 months or so, someone starts a conversation about the demise of Adobe FrameMaker, a popular long-document creation and publishing tool in use for well over a decade in technical communication and engineering circles. This month the discussion was introduced by consultant Bill Greuling, who asked, "Will products and methods such as DITA extensions for MS Word and Adobe InDesign sound the death knell for the trusty old soldier?"

While FrameMaker supports XML, and by extension, standards like DITA, it indeed has competition from a variety of software vendors, including Quark, the desktop publishing giant that recently acquired XPress Author for Microsoft Word from In.vision Research as part of its effort to create an end-to-end XML-based dynamic content management platform. Adobe InDesign is not really competition for FrameMaker, although some technical communication pros do use the tool to create documents. InDesign does appear to be moving into the long document arena and it also now supports dynamic publishing workflows, but the program is actually better suited for marketing collateral creation,

Adobe FrameMaker is not, for the record, a dying product. According to insiders, Adobe is currently working on FrameMaker version 9.0 and the company's successful Technical Communication Suite relies on FrameMaker as an integral part of the product suite. FrameMaker has been integrated into the Adobe Technical Communication Suite.

So, as I've said many times before, FrameMaker is not going away. Repeat after me. FrameMaker is NOT going away. At least not for a very long time.

Creating XSL in MS Word with no special knowledge required

For technical documentation teams working with XML-based content, the cost of formatting content can be significant. That's because XML separates content from its visual formatting and relies on a set of separate XML documents called style sheets to dictate how the output generated will look. The creation (and maintenance) of these publishing transformations -- made possible by the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) -- can be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Creating XSL transforms is not something most technical communication professionals can tackle without specialized knowledge and training. Most organizations outsource their transformation requirements to an external consultant; others retain specialized - and hard to locate and replace - internal resources. Both approaches are costly and, ultimately, many organizations become hostage to the intellectual property accumulated in their transformation scripts, unprepared or unable to modify them to meet evolving business needs.

That is, until now. Ontario, Canada-based SiberLogic has released a promising new product -- SiberSafe Styler -- that leverages Microsoft Word's XML capabilities and familiar document formatting interface. Open a representative sample XML document in Word, and assign Word-based styles to the tags presented (page, paragraph, font, bullet and numbering, etc.), and SiberSafe Styler produces a stylesheet that can then be used to process any XML document that features similar XML elements and element hierarchies. Load the stylesheet into your CMS publishing environment, publish to WordML, then output to paper, to HTML, or to PDF using Adobe PDFMaker. It's very useful and demonstrates a trend in the industry amongst vendors -- enabling Microsoft Word users to create content instead of focusing on becoming XML experts. Expect more tools like this to enter the market, including some competition for SiberSafe Styler.

If you're interested in learning more about SiberSafe Styler, download a free evaluation copy and try it out on your own XML content.

Until next month…

August 2008