RE: Future of FrameMaker: InDesign?

[HALL Bill <bill.hall@xxxxxxxxx>]

David's question as why the Frame MIF format is not widely applicable
focuses directly on the reasons why XML is having such a fundamental impact
on documentation technology.

Personally, I have never had any reason to explore the MIF possibility.
However, my off the cuff understanding (and others should correct me if I am
wrong) is that MIF is an proprietary but openly (i.e., published) standard
markup for describing FM documents, in the same way that RTF is an open
standard for MS Word documents.

Such standards are still format oriented and relate to and work best with
the logic of the proprietary formatting engine. Thus they represent the
document as it is formatted in a paper paradigm. Also, given that format
oriented systems offer a number of different ways to apply similar formats,
it is likely that MIF is considerably more difficult to interpret than pure
SGML/XML. This is certainly the case for RTF.

By contrast SGML and XML are international standards for marking up the
logical structure of documents. The document type definition (DTD) defines
the different elements of content allowed to occur in a document conforming
to that DTD and sets rules defining where particular elements may (or must)
occur within the overall sequential and hierarchical structure of the
document. Except in special cases like the HTML DTD, which was defined
specifically to express formats, SGML/XML documents convey only structural
information, and leave it up to independent processes to apply formats. The
standards are maintained and published by international bodies including
representatives of a wide range of application developers and major end-user
organisations to ensure that the markup languages meet specified goals.

For this reason SGML/XML markup is ideally suited for use by information
management and processing applications which need to understand the logical
and semantic structure of documents. Because the primary concern of MIF and
RTF is format, there is far too little control over how the format is used
for the markup, so these markups are of little use in logical or semantic
processing of document content. Based on my own experience, with properly
designed styles and very well disciplined users, you can readily convert RTF
to semantic markup (SGML/XML), but you have to have fairly powerful demands
from users not to do your work in SGML/XML in the first place.

In this sense, MIF is no better than RTF. Basically both markups provide
published interchange standards which allows developers to build
applications able to port in and out of the respective internal formats, but
neither comes close to the planned universality and structural controls
provided by valid SGML and XML.

In a sense, this is another version of the application holy wars arguments.
Word, FrameMaker, RTF and MIF represent documents as formatted text on paper
- good only for reading by humans. The SGML/XML applications represent
documents as logically structured elements content which can be readily
parsed and processed by computer systems, as well as being able to be
formatted for the human users.

Adobe has a choice. Do they stay with producing applications that are firmly
embedded in the paper paradigm, which is only useful to people, or to they
realise that in the near future most people will use computerised systems to
extend their cognitive abilities. 

I am 61 years old, and by using the Web and its still limited content
retrieval capabilities (i.e., Google: http://www.google.com) I have already
increased my own content development capabilities (i.e., building business
cases, etc.)several times over compared to what I could do with an
unconnected word processor. XML content and XML aware applications will
increase this several more times. 

I mention Google, because in the last couple of weeks they have actually
managed to index over 1 billion! pages of Web content with some very smart
ranking algorithms (http://www.google.com/pressrel/pressrelease26.html).
Unfortunately bigger indexes often mean even more crap. Some queries
retrieve tens of thousands of matches and I can't think of a way to phrase
my query that will guarantee a high rank for the few gems I actually need.
How much more powerful will these kinds of systems be when the user can
actually specify what KIND of information is sought. Semantic markup
provided by XML is the key. MIF isn't.


Regards,

Bill Hall
Documentation Systems Specialist
Integrated Logistic Support
Naval Projects and Support
Tenix Defence Systems Pty Ltd
Williamstown, Vic. 3016 AUSTRALIA
E-mail: bill.hall@tenix.com <mailto:bill.hall@tenix.com> 

-----Original Message-----
From: David Cramer [mailto:dacramer@home.com]
Sent: Tuesday, 4 July 2000 7:31
To: framers@omsys.com
Subject: RE: Future of FrameMaker: InDesign?


To Bill and Dan,

In this regard, perhaps you could comment on the place of MIF in all 
of this. As far as I know, MIF is a totally nonproprietary 
representation of anything that could possibly exist in a FrameMaker 
or FrameMaker+SGML layout and document.

Many of the complaints about FrameMaker's not advancing and adding 
requested features have nothing to do with what can be in a document. 
They essentially amount to interface change requests or added 
processing commands. They would not have had any impact on the 
resulting document anyway.

Given the apparent desirability of a robust, nonproprietary document 
format, is there some reason, legally or functionally, that MIF has 
not been more widely influential? (Just curious)

David
-- 
David Cramer, Process Innovation Evangelist          87-1313 Border Street
PBSC Computer Training Centres (an IBM company)      Winnipeg MB R3H 0X4
Corporate Office Research & Development              Canada


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