RE: MS Word and XML

[DW Emory <danemory@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Moritz Berger et al argue that very old legacy documents stored on 
floppyies can easily be recovered. Apparently they haven't heard of the 
legacy doc nightmares experienced by many large companies and government 
agencies who discover, too late, that they still need those old docs, and 
find it to be virtually impossible to bring them into some "modern" DTP. 
There are large outfits like Data Conversion Laboratories (DCL) who make an 
excellent living by coming up with (very expensive) conversion solutions 
for such legacy docs. The last time I heard, DCL wouldn't touch anything 
less than a million pages. All sorts of documents, not just technical 
manuals, often have legacy value, particularly for information reuse. They 
include business documents of all kinds, as well as old proposals, 
specifications, systems and procedure manuals, etc.

And large companies like Boeing who subcontract huge amounts of work have 
one helluva headache trying to take vendor manuals from those 
subcontractors and convert them so that they are conformant with their 
customer's specs (e.g., ATA specs, MIL specs, etc.).

All of this is avoidable.


FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
DW Emory <danemory@globalcrossing.net>


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