Author Archives: Don

If you plan to attend DITA Europe 2011 in Prague, watch for my session on “Integrating social media into new DITA workflows” on Tuesday November 8. In addition, on the 9th, I’ll be helping to facilitate the following related activity, … Continue reading →

Creating documentation using wikis or wiki-like software is inherently all about collaboration between various parties: programmers, testers, technical writers, and even informed users.  More than any other form of cloud-based collaboration, wikis are a natural way to enable your extended … Continue reading →

While some of the new features of HTML5 have a direct bearing on its future relationship with DITA (per my previous two posts on the subject, What HTML5’s parsing algorithm means for DITA and What HTML5’s outlining feature means for … Continue reading →

“Tag soup” is neither satisfying nor nutritious. This pejorative name describes the form of unstructured HTML that browsers have had to consume since day 1 of the World Wide Web. As the name implies, it is a mixture of markup … Continue reading →

Before XML and SGML, IBM’s Generalized Markup Language (GML) represented document structure in a tag-like way, expressing the semantics of the content while separating that content from the underlying formatting controls. GML’s structural elements included the express heading level tags, … Continue reading →

My new blender has a programmed mode in which the ingredients initially swirl around just before it goes into a surge of power that brings everything together into something new. HTML5 is like that: buzz about this mysterious upgrade first … Continue reading →

I was listening to Steve Erquiaga’s Windham Hill version of Faure’s Pavane and noticed the poster’s comment that Steve is a Jazz and Classical crossover artist. It struck me that Steve’s seamless performance, blending styles in a single stream, is not unlike … Continue reading →

The Implications are upon us! In the past month, I’ve seen a surge of discussion about the rising impact of social networks on the traditional habits of Web users. One of the most trending articles has been “The Web is … Continue reading →

I’ve been tracking the growing scope for “simpler DITA” editors for several years. I’m not surprised that the trend exists–I’ve helped encourage it, in fact. In her post on The devolution of DITA editors, Sarah O’Keefe asks, What is the case … Continue reading →

I chuckled at Mark Baker’s recent post where he surmised that The Reader is the Enemy because I agreed that the cues he listed all do seem so damning (haven’t we all said or heard, “grab the reader” and “hold … Continue reading →