Pigs at the XML Trough

If Microsoft is infringing on this patent, so too is every company employing XML to separate content from presentation. But why let reality and common sense stand in the way of a decision driven by the insatiable greed of a few "legally pigally" types?

The company claims rights to the concept of "manipulating the architecture and the content of a document separately from each other." If this decision stands, they'll soak Microsoft for $200 million. As an aside, they get to make MS quit selling Word, too.

But hey, why stop at Microsoft when there's so much more meat on the table? Why not make similar infringement claims against other companies whose products manipulate "the architecture and the content of a document separately from each other." You know, like FREAKING EVERYTHING XML!

Hello? Is it the insomnia, or would this patent cover ... I don't know ... DITA, DocBook, TEI, and pretty much everything in between?

As the judge and jury conceived it, anyone who sells a product that manipulates "the architecture and the content of a document separately from each other" is at risk of infringement. If these dunderheads had any clue about how XML figures in the manipulation of "the architecture and the content of a document," they'd see that this could include just about every company that sells XML content creation and management solutions.

Not a bad score for the pigs at the trough. Just imagine the number of billable hours they'll book chasing after companies diverse as IBM and EMC, to small businesses developing software like XMLMind and Serna - all of whom it will be argued, infringe upon this patent. Even small, sole proprietors and consultants should prepare for the inevitable legal BOHICA. So broad is this patent, if you're reading this through Blogger or Facebook, you too might be abetting patent infringement.

Isn't Lawyer Capitalism grand!

Required Reading

Tim Rosa at The Business Insider says my recent WritersUA article "should be required reading for all technical writers."

Who am I to disagree?

INSIGHT: Opportunities in Obama's Electronic Medical Records (EMR) Initiatitive

Accessible Documents

Check out my new article at the WritersUA web site.

http://winwriters.com/articles/accessibility/index.html

In it, I talk about using Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat to create documents that provide accessibility to vision-impaired users .

Thanks go out to Joe Welinske for his support and encouragement.

Sign of the Times

From an AP story on the end of the Nepalese monarchy:

Nepal's monarchy abolished; king has 15 days to leave palace

"...While the Maoists say they are committed capitalists and have no intention of nationalizing industries or setting up collective farms, they have promised to bring sweeping change to this largely impoverished country."

Not So Obvious, After All

In his post "Back to DITA?", Gordon McLean muses on a solution to his content development challenge:

The obvious answer is single source using DITA to structure the content, storing the content as XML to give us the greatest potential avenues for re-use.

I'd ask Gordon why he believes DITA is the "obvious" answer to his content issues when DocBook can support every use case he describes?

Out of the box, DocBook enables you to publish your content in PDF, JavaHelp and HTML (just to name a few). Its profiling feature provides you the flexibility to produce multiple versions of your content (Windows, Unix, and Mac, for instance) and maintain it as standalone topics packaged in tidy little XML files, all in a single content repository.

How about using DocBook and the DocBook Stylesheets, along with the excellent XMLMind editor to develop your content (and maybe XML Notepad to tweak the markup and Word to tweak RTF output)? What about managing your files in a Subversion repository and using a simple Access database and desktop search engine to keep track of your content?

While decidedly low tech, this "solution" will enable you to easily deliver multiple versions of your content in all the usual output formats. You'll be able to set up this development and publishing environment in about a day and spend a little less than $300 U.S. dollars (for XMLMind Professional Edition). I'll bet you'll be quite satisfied with the results.

Sure, the ultimate end-to-end solution Gordon describes in his post might exist somewhere in the vendor community, but I very much doubt he'd be able to deliver the first bit of output within several months of signing a contract; never mind spending several thousands of dollars for "professional services."

Rather than wait for vendors to catch up to your use case or spend thousands (more likely, tens of thousands) of your company's dollars to develop some high-tech "solution," why not give this DocBook/XMLMind/Subversion/Google Desktop Search mashup a try? You'll get all the practical results of a DITA-based CMS, without the expense and the lengthy ramp-up time. You'll achieve the benefits of XML authoring today, rather than waiting for that magical "someday" that may never come.

Of course, if you just have to have DITA; if you just can't wait to throw money at vendors, starting with DocBook will make your move to that ultimate DITA/CMS nirvana all the easier.

Just one man's opinion, of course.

"A little humor, my dear Zilkov, always with a little humor "

When I read a recent post by my friend Sarah O'Keefe (well, not so recent - I've been busy, okay), I just had to chuckle.

It seems now we'll all be using DITA for narrative documents.

That's interesting. For years, technical communicators have been swamped with article after presentation after white paper after webinar - ad nauseum - telling us how DITA is the best game in town for marking up topic-oriented, modular content.

Tell a DITAdroid that DocBook does a pretty good job with modular topics, too, and watch them turn on the "concept-task-reference" mantra like Laurence Harvey playing solitaire in the Manchurian Candidate. The über markup geeks roll their eyes and breathe heavy sighs in a world-weary, "don't you get it" sort of way.

Repeat after me. DocBook is for Narratives. DITA is for topics. Four legs good, two legs bad:

• "[DITA] is different from DocBook in that DITA is topic-oriented..."
• "DocBook and DITA take fundamentally different approaches…"
• "DocBook was originally designed for a single, continuous technical narrative…"
• "DITA was designed for discrete technical topics..."
• "DocBook would be the likely choice for a technical narrative…"
• "DITA would be the likely choice for large, complex collections of topics…"

"Technology Reports: Darwin Information Typing Architecture"
http://xml.coverpages.org/dita.html#relatedDocBook

For DITAdroids, the first, last and best answer on DocBook is that it's best suited for narratives and hopelessly inadequate for anything other than books. End of story. Period. Fin.

Say anything to the contrary and be prepared to get whacked. So, be sure to pay your respects to The Don and kiss the Big Blue Godfather's ring. State clearly your unqualified and enthusiastic support for DITA and reiterate your breathless anticipation for the benefits to mankind its inevitable ascendancy will bring.

"Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life"

Now, we're told that DITA is the bees knees for narrative content, too. Not only that, it's dirt cheap.

Oh brother.

DISCLAIMER: Any likeness to anyone mentioned in this article – especially, anyone named Don working at IBM on DITA - is completely coincidental, unintentional and is not the responsibility of this author.

XMLMind 3.7 Does DITA (and DocBook, too!)

The great folks at Pixware have released the latest version of their outstanding WYSIWYG editor, XMLMind.

If you're looking for a powerful and easy-to-use XML editor, you won't find a better value than XMLMind. Version 3.7 offers a number of useful features, least of which are full support for

• DITA DTD 1.1.
• DocBook 5 RELAX NG and Schematron schemas (V5.0CR7)

Download the free Personal Edition of XMLMind 3.7 and take a look. Better yet, buy the full-featured Professional Edition.