Microsoft Corp. announced support for RSS in the next version of the Microsoft Windows operating system, code-named “Longhorn.” The RSS functionality in Longhorn is being designed to make it simple for end users to discover, view and subscribe to RSS feeds, as well as make it easier for developers to incorporate the rich capabilities of RSS into their applications. In addition, Microsoft announced Simple List Extensions, a set of extensions to RSS that can be used to enable Web sites to publish lists as RSS feeds. Microsoft is making the specification and the Simple List Extensions freely available via the Creative Commons license, the same license under which the RSS 2.0 specification was released. While browsing the Web, Longhorn users will be able to discover RSS feeds through an illuminated icon, as well as read the feed while still in the Web browser. In addition, users will be able to subscribe to an RSS feed as simply as adding a Web site to their “favorites.” The RSS features in Longhorn also will enable application developers to harness the capabilities of RSS in their applications. For example, business users about to attend a conference could subscribe to the conference’s event calendar. They can then use a Longhorn RSS-enabled calendar application to view the events in the RSS feed from within their calendar application. The RSS support in Longhorn includes a Common RSS Feed List, Common RSS Data Store, and an RSS Platform Sync Engine. http://www.microsoft.com
Category: Publishing & media (Page 50 of 52)
I spoke today as part of a ClearStory Systems webinar on rich media management. You can get a PDF of my slides here. The full set of slides, including those given by John Gonzalez of ClearStory, will be posted on the ClearStory site later; I will post the link when I get it. My presentation is based heavily on our recent white paper, Rich Media Management and Business Agility.
During John’s presentation, he mentioned how Sony and other customers are using the ClearStory technology to bring more rich media applications to the Web. I like this site, which markets stock video footage from Sony Pictures.
Passing this along from Don Day, Chair of the OASIS DITA Techical Committee:
The OASIS DITA Technical Committee seeks your input on the list of known requirements/enhancements for upcoming DITA TC activity. Your help in ranking this list (or suggesting additional new requirements) will help the TC prioritize the most urgent issues for upcoming DITA 1.1 design work, and beyond. I have posted a list osf the issues currently known to the TC at this location: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/document.php?document_id=12814&wg_abbrev=dita
Please assess what you consider to be your top 5 requirements and submit those Issue numbers to the DITA TC via the comment form:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/comments/form.php?wg_abbrev=dita .
If you have a new issue or requirement not included in this list, please enter it as a separate comment via the comment form. We still need your “top 5” from this list, so read it carefully–most of the known hot issues are in there in one way or another, possibly including yours. There is no need to include more than 5 items in your list at this time; all of the 48 items are candidates for work, but we need to know which are MOST critical for initial work going into DITA 1.1.
This review period opens on May 23 2005 and closes end of day on June 6 2005 (2 weeks).
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.
Arbortext announced the company will release version 5.2 of its enterprise publishing software in September 2005. Representing a year-long development effort, this release has improvements in functionality and compatibility for organizations implementing enterprise publishing applications. The Import/Export feature, which provides conversion between word processing/desktop publishing files and XML, will provide over 50% new functionality and replace Arbortext’s Interchange product. The Import feature will offer much finer control over the conversion of styles into XML tags, so that word processing and desktop publishing files can more easily be translated into XML. The Contributor Web-based XML editor will be able to track changes (additions and deletions) so that editors can review, revise and approve documents more easily. In addition, Contributor will provide an API that provides developers with a greater level of control over the product’s functionality and appearance. DMC (Digital Media Composer) DMC replaces CD-ROM Composer and represents a major upgrade in Arbortext’s capability to publish large sets of documents that are too big to distribute over the internet. DMC can produce both DVDs and CD-ROMs for very large data sets and supports multiple volumes, password security and data compression. http://www.arbortext.com
We have published the results of our informal survey on enterprise use of blog, wiki and RSS technologies. We’ll keep the survey going for awhile and will update the results every so often. To date there are 58 respondents.
A few interesting tidbits:
- Although most respondents are using one of the technologies, only half of them have official IT support.
- knowledge management, internal information dissemination (portals!?), and project collaboration are all closely grouped as the leading applications.
- Shockingly, only a third use RSS!
- Almost a third are using one or more of these for content management. We’ll be sure to explore what this means in our upcoming Amsterdam keynote debate.
I remain a fan of Onfolio, which began life as kind of a personal knowledge manager for Web-based content, but has evolved to also handle RSS feeds and provide more publishing capabilities. I have used it for quite a while now to maintain my eForms Resources page, and am currently using the new version, 2.0, which supports Firefox, which is now my primary browser.
I’ve had some correspondence with Sebastian Gard, who does product marketing for Onfolio. He asked me for some feedback on 2.0 compared to the earlier version of the product, and I offered the following.
Writing for Publish.com, Matt Hicks provides a very good update on SVG support in the browser, putting in perspective recent announcements about SVG support in upcoming versions of Opera and Mozilla Firefox.
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