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Subject:Re: Looking beyond the limits From:"Phillip St. James" <saint0 -at- verizon -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Tue, 4 Jan 2005 21:45:13 -0800
Hi, Sunila -- XML in its present form is probably not going to be an
overwhelming factor in tech writing. Why? Because MS Word and other major
text editors are not doing much to intelligently incorporate XML into their
normal workflow. (FrameMaker is treated as a step-child at Adobe in favor
of InDesign. If FrameMaker is spun off from Adobe and bought by a truly
competent management, technical and marketing team, then maybe the current
versions and deployments of XML will get a proper foundation for extended
life.) Nevertheless, the underlying object-oriented concept for text will
undoubtedly survive and thrive.
That is, tagging text and data so they can be quickly found, assembled
attractively, and reused with ease through a number of access applications
and platforms in widespread use -- is something that will survive, thrive,
and continuously evolve long into the future.
We now have a hot software and standards competition underway among a number
of software publishers that deals with structured text. The W3C central
standard for XML data objects is in flux.
So, without going into a long diatribe, I think that XML is neat. However,
it is relatively obscure, overly complex, too "manual", and quite varied in
its manifestations right now. It is destined to stay that way until it is
either beefed up similarly within the majority of mainstream text editors or
it evolves into a transparent or semi-transparent adjunct text editor
interface that properly "converts" text on the fly, and on demand.
In the meantime, I think that for the next few years XML will be seen and
used, for example, like DHTML compared to HTML.
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