The enormous improvements in quality and productivity that have occurred in industry over the last several decades can, in large part, be attributed to a focus on improving first-run quality. In traditional production line environments, the golden rule was never to stop the production line. Any faults that might occur or be noticed while the… Read More »
Sometimes microblogging questions require macroblogging answers. Here’s the conversation: @arh: Did @hixie really call XML a “disaster”? Is #techcomm aware of this? http://html5doctor.com/interview-with-ian-hickson-html-editor/ @mbakeranalecta: @arh XML is a disaster. Bad implementation of an essential concept. So is QWERTY. So it goes. @arh: @mbakeranalecta Generally agreed. What concerns me are the #techcomm folks who think XHTML… Read More »
Today, Alan Houser (@arh) tweeted: Before I die, I want to hear somebody speak well of their CMS. Especially in #techcomm. Surely somebody must be happy with theirs. To which I (@mbakeranalecta) replied: Indeed, but the CMS model is wrong. Can’t manage large data sets on desktop model. Can’t have good implementation of a broken… Read More »
Links are expensive. That’s a problem, because the web is, and always has been, a hypertext medium, a medium of links. Links, as I have argued previously, are the last mile of findability. Links are how readers move around in your content. More importantly, links are what keep readers in your content, rather than Googling… Read More »
Every time I talk with someone about metadata, I have the feeling we are talking past each other, at least a little. We are both using the same word, “metadata”, but it often seems like we mean different thing by it. So, what does “metadata” mean? Metadata is simply data about data, or, to put… Read More »
The one concession I have been willing to make to the fine chunking characteristic of many DITA implementations is that it was a boon to translation. Apparently not so, according to a recent blog post on Content Rules. The problem is that fine chunking tends to obscure context, making the content impossible to translate reliably.… Read More »