Re: XML cookbook questions

[DW Emory <danemory@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 02:30 PM 8/4/03 +0200, Thomas Michanek wrote:
>Any comments?

Further evidence that the rate of entropy in Adobe's Tech Pubs group is 
accelerating.

One wonders what the purpose of the "cookbook" was. Here are a two 
possibilities.

1. A feeble effort whose purpose was to serve as a substitute for 
improvements in the Developer's Guide.

2. To convince twinkies that, after going through the cookbook procedures, 
they know everything they need to know about structured design and EDDs and 
XML import/export.

As it stands now, there's only one way to learn about proper structured 
design criteria and EDDs and read/write rules and appdefs and templates, 
and that's to jump into the Developer's Guide with both feed and struggle 
through it, then create structured apps, and learn from your own mistakes. 
I have preserved the first structured App I created (in FrameBuilder, back 
around 1994) to remind myself of how far my thinking about structured 
design and usability, and making life easier for authors has evolved.

The most mystifying thing is that Adobe fails to recognize how much easier 
it is for newbies to learn to become effective authors of structured docs 
without the necessity to learn many of the intricacies of FrameMaker that 
are required to produce effective unstructured docs. Rather than investing 
virtually all of the tech pub resources for FM7 on the XML cookbook, Adobe 
should have invested in the development of a good tutorial, accompanied by 
a well-designed tutorial EDD and template, which would allow newbies to 
quickly get up to speed on structured document authoring, without the 
necessity of formal training.

And, of course, for structured application designers, what has been missing 
all along is a good Designer's Handbook which would help designers to avoid 
the lengthy trial-and-error process by which most of us learned how to 
develop structured applications we can be proud of.





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


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