If you have been hearing about Ajax technology and are curious, you might want to check out this pretty cool dictionary site. The developer offers a helpful explanation of how it works, including some potential risks and tradeoffs. Up until now, Google Suggest has been kind of the canonical example of Ajax for this kind of application, but I think I like this one better. Some of the bloggers over at ZDNet have been doing a nice job of explaining Ajax and other such technologies and how they will impact traditional applications such as Microsoft Office. I think there are all kinds of implications for content management, with authoring and search interfaces only the beginning.
Category: Content creation and design (Page 67 of 70)
Technologies and strategies for authoring and editing, including word processors, structured editors, web and page layout and formatting, content conversion and migration, multichannel content, structured and unstructured data integration, and metadata creation.
FrameMaker 7.2 was announced this week (see our news here and Adobe’s home page for the product here). Our news story touches on many of the new product features, but a few things are worth highlighting. Overall, the release is a significant step forward for FrameMaker, and should be seen as very welcome news for organizations that rely on the product for technical publishing.
- The new release adds XML schema support. While Karl Matthews, Adobe’s Group Product Manager for FrameMaker, was careful to point out to me that the schema support does not extend to data typing, I think this is sufficient for the kinds of publishing applications FrameMaker users would develop.
- The product now includes XSLT support. XSLT transformations can be invoked at the time a structured FrameMaker document is opened or saved. This will enable, for example, a “save as” function that could invoke an XSLT transformation on an XML document to create other content sets, metadata extractions, and so on. This is a clever addition to the product, and gets FrameMaker developers away from being reliant on the FrameMaker SDK.
- The product comes with a starter application for DITA. This is also welcome news, as there is a groundswell of support for DITA, and an independent group had been working on a separate FrameMaker application for DITA. This gives FrameMaker users a DITA application supported by Adobe. Moreover, the FrameMaker DITA application reflects a great deal of work Adobe had done in-house using FrameMaker to produce the documentation set for Adobe Creative Suite 2. (For Adobe’s own case study of how they used FrameMaker for this project, you can download this pdf. A related case study at Idiom’s web site describes how FrameMaker was used with Idiom’s WorldServer technology to manage the localization of the documentation into many languages.)
- The new version also adds some additional features and functionality for migrating unstructured FrameMaker content to XML. They have a pretty useful Migration Guide here (pdf).
On the whole, I was impressed with what I learned about the new release. It has some important new structural features (schema, XSLT), and the DITA application is timely and useful to a growing number of potential users. The strength of this release should quiet some of the feelings among users that Adobe is not fully committed to FrameMaker. Moreover, at a list price of $699, FrameMaker continues to provide a great deal of value for its user community by combining XML editing, high-quality print publishing, well integrated support for Adobe PDF, and support for multichannel publishing.
It is good to see that MS is plugging away at this and now providing a way to really take a look at it. I am not qualified to comment on its technical merits, but the idea is important (to content management but more to computing in general) and something we have been watching for a long time. Dan Farber’s entry on this release has some useful links, and Wikipedia has an accessible intro to WinFS
Microsoft announced that XML will be the default file format for Office 12. I’ll look more at the details and what this means to OpenOffice etc. when I get a chance, but this is certainly great news and another major step forward for XML in general and Microsoft’s support for it. It looks like Microsoft has addressed (full Microsoft press release) the main concerns that critics exposed during the OpenOffice debate we have been covering here and in our conferences. Tim is impressed!
Update: Dan Farber has some additional info from Microsoft.
Update 2: Dan points to info from Rick Schaut on Office 12 Mac XML support.
Microsoft Corp. announced that it is adopting XML technology for the default file formats in the next version of Microsoft Office editions, currently code-named “Office 12.” The new file formats, called Microsoft Office Open XML Formats, will become the defaults for the “Office 12” versions of Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint, which are expected to be released in the second half of 2006. The interoperability capabilities of the Microsoft Office Open XML Formats enable Microsoft Office applications to directly access data stored in systems outside those applications, such as server-based line-of-business applications. These third-party applications, in turn, can access data stored in the new Office file formats. Microsoft Office Open XML Formats are fully documented file formats with a royalty-free license. Anyone can integrate them directly into their servers, applications and business processes, without financial consideration to Microsoft. People using Office 2000, Office XP and Office 2003 will be able to open, edit and save files using the new formats, thanks to a free update available as a download from Microsoft that enables those older Office versions to work with the new formats. Documents created with the current binary file formats in Office also will be fully compatible with “Office 12” applications. So workers can save documents to their current formats and exchange those documents with people using “Office 12” — and when they upgrade to “Office 12,” they can continue to use their existing binary documents. Microsoft will provide further technical information about the Microsoft Office Open XML Formats, including draft versions of the schemas, to help ensure that developers and IT professionals can be prepared to take advantage of the formats before product shipment. People interested in the new file formats and the next version of Office can get additional information beginning Monday, June 6 at a preview site, http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview
It is excellent news that OASIS has approved OpenDocument as a standard. Hopefully it will also become an ISO standard. However, neither of these mean that it is necessarily the right approach for you. A single schema, no matter how well-designed, will not work for everyone. James Governor is quoted in the release: “One key to success will be the royalty free status of the spec; there are no financial penalties associated with developing to it.” Very true, but Microsoft’s schema is also royalty and cost free, and I believe they have committed (contractually even I think…?) e.g., to the EU, to keep it that way. See more on this here and here.
OASIS announced that its members have approved the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. OpenDocument provides a royalty-free, XML-based file format that covers features required by text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents. OpenDocument provides a single XML schema for text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents. It makes use of existing standards, such as HTML, SVG, XSL, SMIL, XLink, XForms, MathML, and the Dublin Core, wherever possible. OpenDocument has been designed as a package concept, enabling it to be used as a default file format for office applications with no increase in file size or loss of data integrity. Future plans for the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee include extending the standard to encompass additional areas of applications and users, as well as adapting it to incorporate ongoing developments in office applications. All those interested in advancing this work, including governments, open source initiatives, educational institutions, and software providers, are encouraged to participate in the Committee. OASIS hosts an open mail list for public comment and the opendocument-dev mailing list for exchanging information on implementing the standard. http://www.oasis-open.org
I am often guilty of not keeping up with the blogs that are worth reading. I recently took to reading Dave Winer’s blog regularly, and it is a real pleasure. He has all kinds of good technical insight, of course, and has been talking a lot about podcasting lately. You could make the argument Dave is the father of blogging, so it is interesting to keep up with where he thinks things are going.
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