RE: [docstandards-interop-discuss] Clarifications / Scope of the intended work?

["David RR Webber \(XML\)" <david@drrw.info>]

Michael,

 

Users need the business functionality.  They do not care about engineers obsession with syntax level details ; -)

 

They think in terms of business concepts - pages, page counts, titles, bookmarks.  At that level - every document is the same.  If we support that level of handling here - we provide the means for them to do the business job they need.

 

We need to de-couple the notion about PDF - I don't work for Adobe - and I couldn't careless about one syntax over another!  And what history teaches us - is that the underlaying syntax changes constantly.

 

Horses for courses.  In the original XML world conceived by the W3C - theoretically you had simple XML and then the presentation layer.  The glue between them is xslt and FO - but this is in a page-less model - because browsers do not have page concepts, nor dpi - documents do - and more!

 

In the world of documents the reality is that MS Word won the battle because it gave users richer printed documents more easily than the competition.  Similarly PDF is focused there too - but cross-platform / device.  These are things the simple W3C XML model was never intended to solve.

 

Now - retroactively we're introducing more XML into the document mix - embedded metacontent, etc.  What I am saying is you need to focus on the xslt / FO "glue" approach here to succeed - because the other problem is much larger and gnarly and changing.

 

Notice BPEL has taken 4 years and counting.  What size effort are you looking at?

 

I can safely say the function based approached - using iText as the base model - can be done in 1 year.  Once you have that in the bag - and implemented - then you can go after the other stuff from there!!!

 

DW

"The way to be is to do" - Confucius (551-472 B.C.)

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RE: [docstandards-interop-discuss] Clarifications / Scope of
the intended work?
From: Michael Priestley <mpriestl@ca.ibm.com>
Date: Tue, April 10, 2007 12:29 pm
To: "David RR Webber (XML)" <david@drrw.info>
Cc: docstandards-interop-discuss@lists.oasis-open.org


Hi David,

>By creating a standard around the functions and the processing - we establish that "lingua franca" at the level of
>the processing required - not the underlying vendor specific document syntax goup - that will change every time they release a new product.

Are you suggesting that the output format from an XML document is more stable than the XML format itself? That certainly seems at odds with the generally asserted purpose of XML, to separate content from presentation so that the content is reusable across multiple presentation contexts. It sounds like what you're saying is that content is more reusable when it is combined with presentation. This is counter to the founding assumptions of most XML document standards.

I can see the point of integrating PDF into a document lifecycle as source when the original document source is not available, or is in some vendor-specific format - but that is not the context here. Using PDF as an interchange format between DocBook and DITA, for example, would be very strange indeed.

Michael Priestley
IBM DITA Architect and Classification Schema PDT Lead
mpriestl@ca.ibm.com
http://dita.xml.org/blog/25