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What Is A Book And Why Does It Matter? [Part Two]

May 7, 2010 Uncategorized 1 Comment

By Richard Hamilton, special to The Content Wrangler Part one of this two part series looked into what a “book” really is. While I suggest you read that article first, for the impatient, here it is in one paragraph: Beyond the now obsolete “dictionary” definition of a book as a physical object, five qualities define a book: selection, organization, editing, packaging, and distribution. Although not part of any definition I could find, these “defining qualities” of a book have existed for as long as we have had books, and they …

Choosing an XML Schema: DocBook or DITA?

April 11, 2008 Blog 3 Comments

By Richard Hamilton, special to The Content Wrangler (reprinted with permission) If you follow the latest trends or have been to a conference recently, you may find the idea of choosing an XML schema puzzling. Isn’t the question really, “How should I customize DITA to do what I want”? While there are many good reasons to choose DITA, it’s not the only schema in town. The two most popular schemas at the moment are DocBook and DITA, and I’ll use them as examples. There are other choices—S1000D and TEI come …

Introducing Mr. XML Publisher

February 8, 2008 Blog No Comments

When you use any XML publishing system, you make possible the enforcement of consistent formatting and the removal of formatting duties from your writers’ responsibilities. Depending on the system’s data access mechanisms, XML publishing systems can also make it easy to re-use content. When you use Mr. XML Publisher, you centralize on a server the executables and config files that might otherwise exist on the desktop machines of many writers. Without a centralized server, the individual efforts required for installation, configuration, and any necessary synchronization can be very expensive. Check …

DocBook v4.5 Now An OASIS Standard

October 20, 2006 Blog No Comments

OASIS, the international standards consortium, announced that its members have approved DocBook version 4.5 (PDF) as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. Widely adopted by technical writers since its introduction in 1991, DocBook provides an XML markup vocabulary for authoring and exchange of prose content, especially technical documentation. “DocBook enables you to author and store documents in a presentation-neutral form that captures the logical structure and semantics of the content,” explained Norman Walsh of Sun Microsystems, chair of the OASIS DocBook Technical Committee. “With …