A new XML-based content management system that is not based on DITA. Bet you didn’t see that coming. But I think it tells us something interesting about the two sides of structured writing. Tom Johnson’s recent sponsored post explains the origins of Paligo, a relatively new CCMS out of Sweden. Paligo was developed by a company… Read More »
XML sucks. Don’t get me wrong. All kinds of really valuable and important systems use XML to perform vital functions. But performing a vital function does not keep something from sucking. Lots of people think Windows sucks, but it performs a vital function, and lots of people use it because of that. In fact, performing a vital… Read More »
Tom Johnson wrote a post recently in which he questioned the value of structured writing for developer documentation. Needless to say, I disagree. But Tom and I are not really at odds here. Rather, he means something different by “structured writing” than I do. Structured writing is about content quality, not publishing What I mean… Read More »
A number of readers have asked me to write about how to design a topic type. Although it can sound complicated, especially if your bring XML schema definitions into the mix, designing a topic type is actually pretty simple. Before we begin, though, set aside all the issues around XML. XML has nothing to do with… Read More »
XML is not the answer. Structured writing may be the answer. XML is one way to implement structured writing. More and more these days, I am hearing technical publication managers (and not a few consultants) talk about the need to “move to XML”. This may be a shorthand way for them to describe a very… Read More »
My last post, I am a Content Engineer, was taken by several people as yet another attempt to rebrand technical writing. I’m honestly a bit mystified by how people could interpret some of the examples of content engineering that I listed as being examples of technical writing, but Hi Ho. Let me set the record… Read More »
In the closing keynote of the 2013 LavaCon conference, Ann Rockley talked about the rising importance of content engineering in content strategy. A content engineer, Ann explained, is someone with one foot in the technology world and one foot in the content world. Last year I wrote a pair of posts on my hesitation about… 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 »
Continuing my reconsideration of concept, task, and reference as cardinal topic types, this post is about reference. I planned to call it “A Reference is Not a Table”, as I promised in The Tyranny of the Terrible Troika, but thinking more about it I realized that the issue is really much broader than that. The… Read More »
In The Tyranny of the Terrible Troika, I complained that the now almost universal trio of concept, task, and reference did not properly represent what topic-based writing and information typing are really about, and I promised to show why each one, as popularly practiced, fails as both a topic type and as an information type.… Read More »