Re: [FrameSGML] Re: Office 2003 Beta (long)

[larry.kollar@xxxxxxxxxx]

> Some of your comments suggest that the writers who originate documents 
should
> be separated from the "Document Designers" who define the formatting.
> Such an approach goes back to the dark days before WYSIWYG DTPs,
> and before the advent of template designs which predefine formatting, 
thereby
> reducing the job of the writer simply to select and apply the applicable 

> tags from the template.

Dark days? I remember the stampede to WYSIWYG as a time when we gladly
sacrificed functionality and stability for a chimeric "ownership" of
hardware. I don't know what you were used to in those days, but *roff
formatters could utilize sophisticated macro packages that left lots of
complicated formatting details to the computer. And while the "designer"
and the writer may have been two different people in most cases, isn't
that the case today? It's usually a writer or editor that designs the
style & has to use it too. Even if the entire department gives input on
the presentation, one person is normally the Keeper of the Stylesheet.

I'm sure you didn't mean it this way, but the comment about "reducing
the job of the writer to [apply tags]" leaves out a lot of what most
writers do, or at least the writers I'm familiar with -- creating and
maintaining content is a lot more involved than picking a tag or element.


> The problem is that, when a structured Frame document is exported to 
SGML or
> XML, the EDD's format rules cannot be converted to a DSSL or XSL 
instance
> which preserves the original formatting and layout.

I think "cannot" might be too strong a word here. An EDD is a structured
file, and (looking at the structure) I don't see any reason why someone
couldn't transform its embedded formatting information to XSL or DSSSL
given sufficient time & motivation to create the necessary XSLT. Chris
also pointed out that Frame (not to mention WebWorks) can generate CSS
from the EDD, which may be sufficient for certain applications. Having
FO would be nice, but an external application could handle that so it
isn't strictly necessary.


More broadly, I don't see anyone here seriously saying that formatting
is never necessary, nor always necessary. In the case of extracting
desired blocks of data from a large document, formatting as such is
just noisy baggage that can be left behind (this could also apply to
whole-document interchange, as the receiving organization usually has
different ideas on presentation). For publishing, the presentation is
important both to give the document an identity and to highlight the
most important information (although the writers may use a different
presentation for convenience's sake).
--
Larry Kollar, Senior Technical Writer, ARRIS
"Content creators are the engine that drives
value in the information life cycle."
    -- Barry Schaeffer, on XML-Doc



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