RE: Document Authoring Tool Woes

["Eve L. Maler" <eve.maler@east.sun.com>]

At 06:08 PM 1/21/01 -0500, Orchard, David wrote:
>I suggest that you try talking with Eve about the W3C xml/xmlspec dtd/xslt.
>When I was active at co-editing XInclude and XLink, there was a W3C DTD.
>Then each WG created it's own stylesheet.  The XLink Ben Trafford and I
>copied mostly from the Schema WG.

The XMLspec DTD is being used for many of W3C's specifications.  I have 
maintained it for the past few years.  My colleague, Norm Walsh, is the 
primary maintainer for the XSLT stylesheet that produces HTML output, and 
html2ps was used very successfully for the XML 1.0 Second Edition spec for 
producing PDF.  If you want to see samples of the DTD and its output, go to:

   http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml

There are several free XML editors.  Most of them (like XML Spy) are really 
not meant for writing prose, but there are others that work pretty well in 
this respect.  I like XED, which is a simple text editor that is DTD-aware, 
and emacs users could use the XML mode that's out there.  Check out the 
following XML portal for a list of free XML editors:

   http://www.startkabel.nl/k/xml/

>Images were created in whatever, then saved as gif.

I think standardizing on GIF or JPEG would work just fine.

>You also might want to check with other Oasis TC's to see if Oasis has
>developed an OASIS Spec DTD/Schema.  If not, you could be in ground-breaking
>territory!  Imagine, you could kick-off the standard that other OASIS tc's
>use.

A few months back, I was in discussions with some OASIS, W3C, and IETF 
people to see about making a more generic version of XMLspec for use in 
other standards development organizations.  I never went through with it, 
but it would be trivial to remove the W3C-specificity out of XMLspec, and I 
bet I could convince Norm to modify his stylesheet to (e.g.) stick the 
OASIS logo in there.

My strong preference is to use XML for our specifications, and I'm willing 
to do some work to help this happen.  It means a little more hassle and 
initial discomfort with the tools, but it's nothing compared to passing 
around proprietary file formats that some people have problems with (I have 
to admit that StarOffice sometimes does a bad job with Word files that have 
embedded graphics), and it just looks really bad to use something 
proprietary. :-)  However, I will leave this matter up to Bob Blakley and 
the other editors to decide (perhaps the discussion should be carried on in 
the security-editors list...).

         Eve
--
Eve Maler                                          +1 781 442 3190
Sun Microsystems XML Technology Center    eve.maler @ east.sun.com