February 16, 2005

DITA 1.0 Committee Draft Open for Public Review

Via Mary McRae at OASIS and Don Day, Chair of the OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) Technical Committee:

The OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) TC has recently approved DITA 1.0 as a Committee Draft and approved it for public review. The public review starts today, 15 February 2005 and ends 15 March 2005.

Public review from potential users, developers and stakeholders is an important part of the OASIS process to assure interoperability and quality. Comments are solicited from all interested parties. Please feel free to forward this message to other appropriate lists and/or post this information on your organization's web site. Comments may be submitted to the TC by any person via a web form found on the TC's web page. Click the button for "Send A Comment" at the top of the page.

We have a white paper on DITA in general and its potential role in globalization. I am also exploring DITA on behalf of a client, so will stay abreast of this.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 08:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 14, 2005

More on XML Hardware

I have commented here and there on XML-aware hardware. One of the companies that seems to have a lot of the mindshare, Datapower, announced a new round of venture funding today. This amid a strengthening market for venture funding here in New England.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 04, 2005

Plays Well With Others

Bill Gates weighs in on XML and interoperability.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 07:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 29, 2005

PRISM Metadata Specification

We haven't looked closely at the PRISM Metadata effort in a while, but the group reached a milestone recently with the release of version 1.2 of the specification. It looks like the recent update focused on some enhancements around RSS and RDF.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 09:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

XML, Britney, and God

In an article for EContent Magazine in late 2003, I wrote:

If you google "XML," you do get a stunning 20.5 million hits, which is about four times as many as "Britney," but—sensibly—half as many as "God." So I guess XML falls short of omniscience. Still, the prevalence of XML has led to its being a too-ready answer to seemingly every question about information technology in general and content management in particular. The assumption seems to be that, no matter the requirement or problem, XML is the answer.

Updating those searches for today's results on Google, I get 119 million hits for XML, which is now about six times as many as "Britney," and now only 10 million fewer than "God."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 08:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 25, 2005

Hosted Solutions for Collaboration

A client of mine is looked for a hosted solution for a document collaboration project that will last several months to a year. Here are a few of the parameters and requirements as they see them:

--10-15 users
--contact storage
--e-mail
--document storage and versioning
--threaded messaging
--calendaring with basic project timelines
--no need to integrate with other applications
--several thousand pages of documents.

They are looking at low- to moderate-cost alternatives and already consider Intranets.com to be an option.

Other suggestions?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 06:15 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 19, 2005

Welcome "Ideas in Technology and Publishing" Readers

With the start of this new group blog, I have decided to fold my technical blog, "Ideas in Technology and Publishing" into this blog. I want to thank my readers and welcome them to join the conversation here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 06:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Slides from Idiom DITA Webinar

I have posted a PDF copy of my slides from the Idiom webinar. If you haven't read our white paper on DITA, you can download it here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 03:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 18, 2005

Binary XML

"Binary XML" sounds like an oxymoron. It is, after all, the plain text encoding of XML that makes it so easy to work with. Heck, I still use the "vi" editor to make quick changes to XML and HTML files.

Writing in the Australian edition of Builder.com, Martin LaMonica provides a nice roundup of the pros and cons of some efforts to develop a binary XML. He summarizes some related projects at Sun and the W3C, and has some very lively quotes from XML guru (and Gilbane Report Editor Emeritus) Tim Bray. (And if you want to hear directly from Tim on the issue of binary XML, his blog has plenty of related entries.)

I'll leave it up to people much smarter than me to figure this one out, but the discussion of binary XML is related to the larger question of performance. As XML is more and more pervasive, organizations will need to find ways to deal with performance impacts over time. We talked about XML hardware in this context a few days ago, and ZDNet is reporting today that Cisco may be getting in the XML hardware game. Stay tuned.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 17, 2005

Government, Open Source, and XML

Writing for WindowsIT Pro, Paul Thurrott reports that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has reached agreement with Microsoft on a license change to Microsoft Office that may have far-reaching consequences in several arenas of interest to Gilbane Report readers.


Microsoft has reached an agreement with Massachusetts that will result in the software giant easing its license restrictions for its Office 2003 document formats in return for the state dropping a previous requirement to only use document formats based on open standards. In early 2004, Massachusetts announced that it would require all state agencies to create and store information in document types based on open standards like HTML... The goal of the format requirement was to ensure that the state could read digital documents in perpetuity and not have to worry about document conversions down the road if they adopted a format that was later abandoned by its maker. However, under terms of its agreement with Microsoft, Massachusetts has revised its requirement to include so-called "open formats" such as the XML-based document types supported by Office 2003 applications such as Word and Excel.

Thurrott goes on to say that this compromise with Microsoft should be viewed as a blow to open source advocates, who would rather see governments adopt open standards for document archiving. Thurrott has a good point; I know from my own consulting that government archivists would love to have open, high-fidelity document formats to choose from. On the other hand, it is potentially good news that Microsoft will be loosening its licensing restrictions on the schemas that underlie the ubiquitous document formats.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 14, 2005

Back Issues

One of the great things about the revamped Gilbane.com web site is that the current and back issues of the report are now available for free. I say this as one of the current editors, but I also say it as a long-time reader and fan of the newsletter. There are some top-notch articles among the back issues, so I thought I would occasionally point to some of the articles, briefly extract them, and suggest the rest for further reading.

The first one I would like to higlight is a recent article, written by Glen Secor. Glen wrote our most recent article about DRM, Compliance: Make "DRM" A Part of the Solution.

Here, for instance, Glenn discusses how Enterprise Content Management and Digital Rights Management technologies relate to the issue of compliance.

In ECM and DRM systems, content is maintained in some sort of content repository (or database). The ECM system is relied upon to manage internal business rules governing access to and usage of content from the database. But the difference between ECM and DRM systems cannot be stated simply in terms of internal vs. external content flow: both involve the management of content that leaves the enterprise. Indeed, for some compliance needs, such as the sharing of financial data between a company and its outside auditors or the sharing of test results between a hospital lab and a remote clinic, secure information exchange is required for compliance purposes. We should not allow ourselves to get hung up on the differences between content sharing, such as the electronic communication of specifications to a vendor working on a piece of a technology product, and content distribution, such as the sale or licensing of MP3 files through an online music store. Both involve the movement of content from within the enterprise to users outside the enterprise and both require that the content outside the enterprise be secure, i.e. that access and usage be controlled.

Whatever difference exists in the nature of ECM and DRM, then, can be found in the fact that ECM systems deal with content both within and outside of the enterprise, while DRM deals primarily with distributed content. This difference aside, each must be able to address the three core needs expressed above (how the information is stored, who has access to the information and how they gain that access, and how the information can be used once accessed.)

In other words, each must be able to articulate and enforce the business rules that the enterprise applies to its content. If a system can do this, then it can handle any compliance need that arises: the key is in the effective writing of business rules to meet the compliance standard.

It's worth reading the whole thing, which is available in both HTML and PDF formats.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 06:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 12, 2005

Extreme Markup Languages 2005

There is a call for papers out for Extreme Markup Languages 2005, which will be held August 1-5 in Montreal. And this is cool. Mulberry Technologies has a site with the papers from the past four Extreme Markup Languages conferences.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 09:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 06, 2005

XML and Electronic Forms

I haven't updated my eForms Resources page in a while, and I should, as there has been a lot of news lately, including the introduction of Acrobat 7 and Adobe's recent announcement of their LiveCycle Policy Server.

I spent some time today at the formsPlayer Web site. formsPlayer is the XForms technology from UK-based x-port.net Ltd. They have a complete toolkit for developers, but you can also download the player itself for free, and then they have a nice set of example XForms, including ones that combine XForms with SVG.

The installation of formsPlayer requires IE 6, and the latest version of the Microsoft XML parser, but the installation will prompt you for this.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 04:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Workshops for San Francisco Conference

Thinking ahead to San Francisco, we would like to get some input on topics for workshops. In Boston, we had three post-conference workshops:

There's room at the San Francisco conference for additional workshops, and a few potential topics come to mind:

What would people like to see? Please weigh in with preferences and ideas. I am going to look for some kind of online polling device and will look to post a poll based on some initial feedback.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 02:15 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack