From my perspective, DITA (or a good part of DITA – there is also the tech doc focus) is the next step in core SGML/XML. IBM started SGML itself, and later had a fair amount to do with XML: now the same sort of people are working on DITA, making XML safe for the world.

DITA extends SGML constructs such as entities with constructs such as conrefs. Everyone loves the idea of re-use of content, but XML 1.0 is a bit too flexible in this regard. It doesn’t say much about *how* you re-use, associate, and aggregate content, thus tools will do the same thing different ways, or won’t support re-use well at all. DITA fixes this, then immediately (concurrently) applies it to Tech Doc.

DITA is based on the practical experience of some IBM tech doc teams and while their goals and requirements were specific to tech doc, many of the core constructs are not.

Similar to XML itself, which is a meta-language (or language for creating languages), DITA has a powerful specialization methodology, that allows for completely custom document structures, yet a backwards compatibility with the core DITA constructs. If your <eBookPara> tag is read by a DITA rendition tool that only knows the <p> of DITA, you will at least get things rendered, though perhaps not in the special “eBook” way that you prefer. At least the tools don’t break.

It is somewhat confusing that the drivers for DITA remain squarely in the Tech Doc space, yet the solution it provides is often fairly universal. Maybe what DITA needs to do is split into the tech-doc specific DITA and the generic DITA, the way XSL split into XSLT and XSL-FO.

I remember Microsoft tried to hire me in 2002, having found me on the… SVG developers list. Now that was strange, what on earth were they doing stalking us XML geeks?

In a year or so, it became clear; XAML was highly derived from SVG, and would form the basis of WPF and Silverlight later. Unable to embrace a standard, MS had decided to copy standards activity into their own proprietary technology.

The poor SVG black sheep was even abandoned by Adobe itself when they eyed Macromedia/Flash, and enjoyed almost ZERO serious support over a few years, unless you count intensive emulation with XAML and later FXG, or the tireless efforts of a few diehards in places like the Mozilla project and Opera that kept SVG alive.

Fast forward 7 years, and we find Microsoft in the same boat with Apple, falling further behind Adobe’s Flash on the RIA front, with Silverlight piling up on the junkheap of obscurity along with Quicktime. With both proprietary efforts dead in the water, SVG is suddenly appealing to these would-be monopolies, and we find a bizarre rally behind a 10-year-old standard.

Why did they even bother to throw SVG into the mix with HTML5? Certainly the Canvas functionality can accomplish most or all of the core Flash capability that everyone (other than Adobe) wants. SVG and Canvas seem to have complimentary performance depending on what you’re doing. Still, who wants to learn how to do everything two different ways? Perhaps those railroading HTML5 through “spec” processes realize they won’t catch everything with the canvas approach, but more likely, they realize that this 2010 form of “standard” with Apple/Google pushing their rush “standard” out as Microsoft tails along, can have a better chance of flying with some stapled-on integrity from a bygone era.

It is still great to see, there is something really nice about the simplicity of core SVG, and it is fully ironic that its enemies have ended up having to support it despite their traditional opposition to standards. Apple, Google, Adobe, Microsoft have the same monopolistic agendas, yet are forced to co-exist, and let flowers like SVG grow through the cracks.

On the one hand, there is so much commonality and re-use of their content across the web and print media, it is absurd to have two entirely different workflows. On the other hand, the tools that lend themselves to a real multi-channel workflow, such as real XML content management, take extreme effort and time to implement and often have expensive associated software. Even after that effort, authors or content sources may not fit in with the required content process at all. Beyond that, moving content over from an unstructured to a structured format can be really difficult.

Inevitably, XML demonstrations make business users underestimate the challenge. “If you show us something, show us with our content!,” he said; evidently they were shown a rosy picture where perfectly marked up XML flowed easily out into web, print, braille, video, whatever. It is true; if you have rich semantic markup the publishing capabilities are amazing.

The challenge is getting that richly marked up content. It is hardly automatic. The extreme best case for authoring such content is the world of technical documentation, where the authors are typically really technical, and highly-evolved schemas/toolchains like DITA give them guidance on how to structure content. But at the other extreme, with writers who are non-technical, it is hard to get them to work with tools that are too constraining, or to get them to follow rigorous guidelines. No pain, no gain:  without the rich markup, publishing becomes more of a channel-by-channel basis.

I believe over time things will get easier, with standards like DITA, greater support for XML authoring in tools, and better example workflows for organizations smaller than the Department of Defense. But the pace of such improvement is slow.

I still barely know WordPress, but I have had almost no trouble with any aspect of it recently: I played around with various blogging software about 8 years ago, and it was nowhere near this easy. I have only had to do something with PHP within a WordPress site once, and probably because of the nature of the template.

I am an impatient person and I will never be content with the pace of publishing technology, but I have to say that when you look back to where the web was in 1996 and where it is today, it has generally gone the right direction. Well, that is after starting out with a fairly complete misinterpretation.

Proposal for the World Wide Web

The original concept was of course brilliant, and you should check out the proposal for the web if you haven’t already. Basically, the intent of the web was to facilitate two-way communication, but of course the mindset of a Television-soaked population at first thought of it more like a single-direction, one-to-many, broadcast medium. We only understand things in relation to what we’ve seen before, at least at first.

So the Web started out with much knee-jerk reproduction of the Television model, and only with the gradual evolution of blogging and social networking (and concurrent evolution of tools for this) has it become really easy for a person like Paris to get out there and express herself. Now even the large corporations are hyping Facebook and Twitter, with their own YouTube channels and real estate in SecondLife. I think Paris will fare better than most corporations, because the playing field is leveled.

Now that we have XFL and FLA renaming it, can we get a server? I really look forward to this but it remains completely unannounced.

Amazing, what valuable info is it persisting that makes this the right size for a primitive image? When I export as SVG I get 6 lines of code, which look verbose already, but way tiny by compare…

Does anyone remember the quote attributed to Bill Gates that PCs would never need more than 640k of memory? Poor Bill could only see the lower 2/3rds of this rectangle with the dream computer of his age. The only thing more amazing than the continuous exponential increases in memory, disk space, and bandwidth is the way such improvements are consumed by new applications the moment they are available.

I have been interested in, and somewhat connected to, Adobe’s approach to XML for quite some time. In the mid 1990s, FrameMaker supported SGML prior to the birth of XML. In 2000, Silicon Publishing worked with Adobe in publicizing FrameMaker 6.5 as an XML-capable tool, though FrameMaker+SGML only worked with XML in a very cumbersome, awkward way.

I will never forget our first project for Adobe, which was one of the very first Silicon Publishing projects. One Friday in 2000 I went to meet Doug Yagaloff, the publishing genius that led Caxton, and he gave me a copy of Frame+SGML and said I just had to do one simple thing. Import an XML document, and export it back out. That was a long weekend! I felt like I must be very stupid, it took me forever to get anywhere at all. Thankfully, Sunday night I found a “quick guide” online which exemplifies the great patience that is generally characteristic of those working with SGML and document-centric XML. I was able to show Doug an example the following Monday – “it’s hard, isn’t it?” he smiled.

We worked with Adobe on the FrameMaker 7.0 release, which dramatically improved the XML support. Later we put DITA support into FrameMaker for Adobe, which now gives a real head start when working with document-centric XML. I am a strong believer in DITA.

That is the core, semantic XML that SGML was oriented around at its foundation. InDesign got some bare-bones support for semantic XML with 2.0, but it goes nowhere as deep as the support of real XML authoring tools. Probably more interesting in terms of Adobe technology (they bought FrameMaker but it stands outside of their main product offerings) is rendition XML, and here was an area more exciting to us at Silicon Publishing.

Rendition XML

In 1998, when I was still at Bertelsmann, one of our former employees who had moved on to Adobe told me about a very exciting new XML specification: PGML. This made great sense to me, and I was an early enthusiast. It was not long before the PGML effort was subsumed under SVG, and Adobe was a major participant the SVG spec development effort, with their representative, Jon Ferraiolo, serving as lead editor of the spec itself. The Adobe SVG Viewer became the primary way SVG was viewed on the web, while tools like Batik evolved steadily and browsers (with one huge notable exception) gradually evolved support for it. Adobe Illustrator supported and still supports SVG round trip, while InDesign offered SVG export but has since deprecated it.

On another front, rendition of documents, Adobe also participated in the most significant standard: XSL-FO. Here was a document description language highly similar to FrameMaker’s MIF, and again an Adobe expert, Stephen Deach, led the specification definition. FrameMaker never directly supported XSL-FO, but a short-lived server application, Adobe Document Server, offered XSL-FO support via its underlying FrameMaker engine. This was a great XSL-FO implementation, actually, but was not well supported by Adobe and it is now extinct.

On the surface you could consider Adobe a leader in standards-based XML for graphic and document formats. However, as I discussed earlier, there is an interesting mix of motives in the involvement of such companies in web and XML standards. When Macromedia Flash was a competitor, an “open standard” like SVG made sense, but after the Macromedia acquisition, it made less sense.

Adobe has gone down the path of proprietary XML namespaces, not unlike their competitor Microsoft. And like Microsoft, whose XAML is highly derivative of SVG, they have not found a reason to re-invent the wheel.

Three XML Namespaces

There are three XML namespaces that appear critical to the future of document and graphic description at Adobe. These are IDML (InDesign Markup Language), FLA (formerly XFL, the description of Flash, and FXG (the graphic model supported by Flex 4 and central to the designer/developer workflow of Flash Catalyst): FLA handles the complete, interactive Flash model (literally replacing the binary .fla format) while FXG is more about static graphic representation. Theoretically, FXG is open source, as is the Flex SDK, but these remain extremely Adobe-centric efforts.

FXG and FLA have some strong similarities to SVG. In fact Adobe acknowledges the partially derivative nature in the specs. Of course there are differences between what was specified in SVG and what is natural to the graphic model underlying Flash; it appears that SVG would have been difficult to implement across the board, given how Flash was built and the goals of Flex yet they used SVG tags directly where it did fit the Flash model.

FXG is becoming a very powerful specification, now that the Text Layout Framework is built into it. Flash is able to render FXG and Illustrator is able to import/export FXG. With CS5 the designer/developer workflows and the general interaction between print-centric and web-centric work should become much better.

IDML is not derivative from XSL-FO. It represents a very general similarity, especially compared to the earlier INX XML format for InDesign: it is at least a complete document object model. INX was merely instructions to the scripting DOM as to how to create the document. It is too bad that Adobe has not managed to reconcile the text engine of InDesign with that of Flash: it appears that IDML will for the near term stay quite separate from the other Adobe namespaces.

To me, FLA is the most exciting new XML namespace coming from Adobe, but it won’t really be exciting until we have an FLA server that can compile FLA to SWF quickly. Dynamic content is possible with Flash in many ways already, but the possibility of making the entire SWF dynamic and manipulating that content in arbitrary ways with XML tools should bring the form of publishing power we envisioned with SVG to life once and for all.

As they have tended to miss the boat on any server application of their technology, Adobe appears to be slow to perceive the value of such a thing (I once asked Kevin Lynch for a Photoshop server – he questioned whether anyone would want it, citing experience with Macromedia Generator). It is an interesting question which group an XFL server may come out of; such a product could be conceived as natural to InDesign Server, to Flash Media Server (or some other work of the Flash Platform group), or to Scene7 (which has very powerful SaaS rendition capabilities, some of which are based on FXG). We are lobbying…

Adobe has finally built some XML foundation under their rendition models, and we are able to attain many of the things we dreamed of back in the SVG/XSL-FO days, via XML if not via open XML standards. I don’t have big hopes for Adobe integrating semantic XML in their core products (FrameMaker being a black sheep outlier), beyond simple metadata (XMP is good enough here, but document-level metadata is trivial compared to true semantic XML). Hopefully the power of their rendition technology with its new XML underpinnings (and consequent greater extensibility) will provide a foundation that enables other companies and open source efforts to make tools that bring the deeper vision of XML publishing to life.

IDML is wonderful, but it doesn’t on its own do quite everything one has to do to compose and edit dynamic documents. While you can define text and formats in a Story, for example, there is not a pure IDML-based approach to managing in-flow continued headers or copyfitting of text. You can’t use IDML alone to conditionally fill space based on how text flowed: IDML essentially instructs InDesign what to flow into a document, but it is not so different than MIF, XSL-FO, or other document descriptions that often require a two-pass approach to document composition (XSL-FO in some implementations does have extensions that go further than MIF or IDML in this respect): flow the content with IDML then clean things up and reflow based on scripting or plugin-based automation. It would be nice to see the page description itself include such state-based features.

While there are tactics that one can use to include metadata in IDML that round trips with documents, it would also be nice if IDML were more extensible in terms of allowing object-level metadata to persist when the IDML document is round-tripped with InDesign.

The two main perspectives I have seen are Document-centric XML and Data-centric XML. SGML initially appeared in support of document-centric work: managing all the technical documents or contracts of IBM or Boeing, for example. Charles Goldfarb has maintained that “SGML literally makes the infrastructure of modern society possible” and I think he’s right – hmm, should we blame him for the lengths to which humans have gone to destroy the earth?

The document-centric XML world is really a direct continuation of SGML. When XML came out as a standard in 1998, those of us working with document-centric XML became giddy with excitement, anticipating that the standards being proposed at the time (notably XML itself, XLink, XML Schema, RDF, XSL and pre-cursors to SVG) would finally facilitate tools that made publishing work for organizations that weren’t quite as big as IBM or the Department of Defense. The vision of a semantic web and ubiquitous XML multi-channel publishing, seemed to be growing a foundation in theories gaining critical mass, with apparent support of software companies. It appeared these vendors might actually adopt the standards of the committees they were sitting on. “Throw away Xyvision!” I told my boss at Bertelsmann, “this XSL-FO will completely revolutionize database publishing!”

We were sorely disappointed over the next five years. In the years before 1998 W3C standards seemed magical; concepts from the standards were implemented relatively quickly, without perfection but with steady progress: browser updates would reflect CSS and HTML advances; even Microsoft was shamed into some level of compliance. But the monopolistic tendencies of those on the standards committees, coupled with the academic approach of some of the standards committees, managed to make it less and less likely that a given standard would find a functional implementation.

And there was that other perspective – the data-centric side of things. For many reasons, XML was at the right place at the right time in terms of data management and information exchange. In fact, the very year that XML became a standard, it also became the dominant way that machines (servers) talked to each other around the world. Highly convenient for exchanging info, as firewalls would tend to block anything but text over http, while XML markup would allow any sort of specification for data structures, and validation tools would ensure no info was lost.

In 1998, when you asked a programming candidate “what do you know about XML?” only the document-centric people would know anything. By 2000, everyone doing any serious programming “knew” about XML. Trouble was, they typically knew about “XML” only in the much easier-to-use, irrelevant-to-publishing, sense.

And the standards now had to accommodate two crowds. The work of the W3C XML Schema Working Group, in particular, showed the disconnect. Should a schema be easily human readable? What was the primary purpose of Schema? Goals were not shared by the document- and data-centric sides, and data-centric won out, as they have tended to dominate the XML space ever since that time. RELAX NG came about as an alternative, and if you contrast RELAX NG with W3C Schema, you will see the contrast between the power of a few brilliant individuals aligned in purity of purpose and the impotence of a committee with questionable motives and conflicting goals. Concurrent with a decline in the altruism of committee participants was the huge advance of data-centric XML and the disproportionate representation of that perspective.

Ten years later, we find in the document-centric world that toolsets related to XML in a data sense – parsing, transforming, exchanging info – have made great leaps forward, but we are in many ways still stuck in the 1990s in terms of core authoring and publishing technologies. It is telling that descendants of the three great SGML authoring tools as of 1995 – FrameMaker+SGML, Arbortext Epic, and SoftQuad’s Author/Editor, are, lo and behold, the leading three XML authoring tools in 2009.

There have been some slow-paced advances in document-centric XML standards and tool chains as well, especially the single bright light out there for us, Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) which came out of IBM like XML itself. Yet standards for rendition, XSL-FO and SVG especially, have not advanced along with core proprietary rendition technologies such as InDesign, Flash, or Silverlight, though all of these enjoy nicely copied underpinnings pillaged from the standards. More important, nothing has stepped in to replace the three core authoring tools: the “XML support” of Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign, for example, do not approach the capabilities of a true XML authoring application. There are a proliferation of XML “editors” but most of the new ones are appropriate for editing a WSDL file or an XML message (the data-centric forms of XML), not a full-fledged document.

Meanwhile, on the data-centric front, XML has simply permeated every aspect of computing. There are XML data types in database systems, XML features in most programming languages, XML configuration files at the heart of most applications, and XML-based Web Services available in countless flavors.

Document-centric XML is simply a deep challenge that will take more time (and probably more of a commercial incentive) to tackle. For the time being, structured authoring managed the XML way is still implemented mainly by very large organizations: such an approach has “trickled down” from organizations the size of IBM to organizations the size of Adobe (which does, in fact, use DITA now), but there are not tool chains yet available that will bring it down much further. The failure of the W3C XML Schema Working Group to provide a functional specification supporting document-centric XML can hardly be underestimated.

As long as content is not easily authored in a semantically rich, structured fashion, the vision of the semantic web will remain an illusion. When and if document-centric XML gets more attention from standards bodies and software vendors, human communications will become far more efficient and effective.