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RE: .fm vs .e## vs .xml

At 04:07 PM 3/31/2005, Webmaster wrote: 
BACKGROUND: Actually, we're a really small company, I'm the webdeveloper,
and she is a technical writer. She's been asked to take one of her FM files,
and make it into a "website". Well, she doesn't know how to do that, and I
don't like multiple sources, so I suggested DocBook. (because of all the
other outputs she has to do as well) And in addition, this request is going
to become more frequent. The whole idea being we end up with one source:
XML.



An XML approach is very appropriate to the situation you describe and FM can
be a valuable part of a solution.

However, all XML tools must be configured, and every FM application requires
some set up. FM is not a simple XML editor; it is a publishing system that
optionally can use the XML document model. Is your technical writer currently
using structured or unstructured FM documents? If she is working with structured
documents, who maintains the EDD for her documents?

Even if you are using an existing DTD such as DocBook, someone in your organization
will need some expertise in EDDs, read/write rules, and XML import/export. If the
existing document that you want to publish on the web was not created from this
perspective, a significant amount of effort may be needed to switch to this different
model.

--Lynne


Lynne A. Price
Text Structure Consulting, Inc.
Specializing in structured FrameMaker consulting, application development, and training
lprice@xxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.txstruct.com
voice/fax: (510) 583-1505 cell phone: (510) 421-2284 



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