Recently by Bill Trippe

 
 
I am tempted...

 
 

... was announced yesterday, and is available now as a public beta. By all means, check it out. I have been playing with Buzzword, and like it. I did manage to break it trying an Export to Word 2003 XML, but it is a Beta after all.

I do wonder about the export choices, which, apart from Acrobat, zipped XML, and plain text, are all Microsoft--Word 2003, Word 2007, and Word 2003 XML. This makes perfect sense if Adobe sees Buzzword as the Web interface in a Microsoft-centric document workflow. But I can see other use cases, especially ones where the content is destined for a Web CMS (or is already in a Web CMS and is being updated. In these cases, the Web CMS would likely not want the overhead of the complex Microsoft file structures.

I think we are getting a briefing on Acrobat.com shortly. I will see what Adobe has in mind.

I've been intrigued by MadCap Software and their aggressive push into the documentation tools space. We just got an in-depth series of presentations on their products, and I certainly came away impressed. Mary Laplante is quoted in a related article over at EContent Magazine.

Click here to find out.

Andy Updegrove is keeping a running tally over at Standards Blog.

UPDATE: Updegrove is now reporting OOXML will pass the vote, and Slashdot has a roundup that includes reports of irregularities in the voting.

Some news from the W3C:

The XSL Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Requirements Version 2.0. This document enumerates the collected requirements for a 2.0 version of XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO), not for XSLT. XSL-FO is widely deployed in industry and academia where multiple output forms (typically print and online) are needed from single source XML. It is used in many diverse applications and countries on a large number of implementations to create technical documentation, reports and contracts, terms and conditions, invoices and other forms processing, such as driver's licenses and postal forms. The XSL Working Group invites people to help prioritize the feature set of XSL 2.0 by completing a survey until the end of September 2008.

I talk to developers who have ideas about improving XLST. Now is your chance.

For those of you who follow structured FDA submissions such as RPS (Regulated Product Submissions) and SPL (Structured Product Labeling), you should be interested in XPortal.,a portal for preparing electronic submissions for the FDA. Under the direction of the FDA, GlobalSubmit has developed XForms that capture these submissions.

There's an interesting discussion about XML repositories going on over at the XQuery Talk mailing list at Stylus Studio's website. Also, if you are interested in XML repositories, the best publicly available deep-dive is over at Ron Bourret's site.

Jabin White from Silverchair was interviewing me the other day for their newsletter, and one of the questions was about which blogs I read. Of course, I read a lot--a quick count of my RSS reader shows me about 50 blogs under "content management" and "XML." I also have a few RSS feeds for vendor press releases (and a note to vendors--I vastly prefer RSS delivery of press releases over email delivery, so if you have an RSS feed, please email me).

I need to do some housework in my blog list. Out of those 50 or so blogs, at least 10 seem to be completely dormant, and a number are very rarely updated. But there are some I read regularly. These include:

• General CMS blogs like Trendwatch at CMS Watch and the blog Conquering Information Chaos by AIIM's John Mancini


• Two titans of the general technology blogosphere, Dave Winer and Jon Udell.


• The DITA blogs at XML.org.


• The blog by Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg.


• The amazing eBook blog at TeleRead, maybe the most in-depth technology blog on a single subject out there.


• The blog by Brian Jones at Microsoft, who is fronting a lot of their work with Microsoft Office file formats at ISO.


• For DRM, the one and only source, Bill Rosenblatt's DRM Watch.

Aside from blogs, I read XML.com of course, and Robin Cover's Cover Pages. (You have XML pretty much covered if you read these two things--and Gilbane.com of course!)

One other thing I do is use Google news and blog alerts, though sparingly, as you can really get overwhelmed. I get a daily Google Alert on XForms, for example, that is usually very good.

Note that I didn't mention email. I do get a lot of things in my inbox, and read some, but I spend more time pruning my email than I do reading it. I also periodically unsubscribe to email lists and then curse myself for joining them in the first place. I read a few yahoo groups regularly (notably dita-users, now 1824 members strong!), but use the browser interface for that more and more.

So that's my bag of tricks. Any thing else I should be reading?

• Apropos of nothing: when I hear people talking about "tagging" songs in a radio ad, I know that the average person understands markup and metadata even if they don't necessarily use those words.
• Over at CMSWatch, Shawn Shell has a report on last week's SharePoint conference. Shawn notes that SharePoint has now excelled a billion in revenue and 100 million licenses.
• Jeff Potts has some thoughts on the clash of cultures with the recent co-location of AIIM and DrupalCon.
• CM Pros has just put out their call for papers for their spring conference, to be co-located with Gilbane San Francisco in June.
• Bob Ducharme has a new tutorial about DITA specialization over at IBM's developerWorks site.