[ba-unrev-talk] Engelbart siting (citing)
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RE: [xml-doc] Efficient search strategies
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 09:33:31 +0200
From: Peter Ring <pri@magnus.dk> (01)
I didn't bother replying until now, because I couldn't find out what the
fuzz was all about. I'm still not quite sure, but I feel obliged to make
a
statement. (02)
Credentials: I worked for about 10 years as a technical writer in
telecom
instrumentation, using Ventura and FrameMaker for document assembly and
page
composition. I was heavily involved in design reviews and quality
assurance.
Specs and design docs are about as reliable as any other historical
information sources, so crucial information was often collected directly
from source code and circuit diagrams. I'm a M.Sc.EE. I'm currently
developing products and productions systems for a legal publisher, that
is,
I'm writing system designs and code rather than prose. And guess what,
writing good prose and good code has a lot in common [1]. (03)
XML is first of all a marketplace, a way to commoditize previously
exotic
methods and technologies. Most anything that XML is used for has been
done
with SGML or proprietary technologies. If XML is a threat to anything,
it's
vendor lock-in. (04)
Media-neutral and topic-oriented writing was invented and practised long
before XML. In my work, I've tried to be inspired by Doug Engelbart [2]
and
Robert Horn [3]. Robert Horn developed the Information Mapping Method
[4] in
the late 1960's, decades before SGML and XML. (05)
To me, technical writing is about people and what they use documentation
for. Technical communication must play well with the rest of the value
chain. Sometime (quite often), XML technologies let us spend more time
understand the subject matter and the audience, and less time fighting
the
idiosyncrasies of the tools. (06)
Kind regards,
Peter Ring
Magnus Informatik A/S
A Wolters Kluwer Company (07)
[1] http://www.literateprogramming.com/
[2] http://www.bootstrap.org/engelbart/index.jsp
[3] http://www.stanford.edu/~rhorn/
[4] http://www.infomap.com (08)
-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Harvey [mailto:binisiya@yahoo.com]
Sent: 2. oktober 2002 20:50
To: xml-doc@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [xml-doc] Michael Priestley - Efficient search strategies (09)
<snip /> (010)
Let me make clear again. My challenge is to the
profession which allows vendors to define its
relevancy and mission. The rise of XML is yet another
example of the profession accepting unsubstanciated
claims as an article of faith while critical
questions, even to a profession in relative infancy,
go largely unasked and unaddressed. (011)
<snip /> (012)
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