Via Cafe con Leche (Elliotte Rusty Harold), the first public working draft of Best Practices for XML Internationalization has been released by the W3C Internalization Tag Set Working Group.
Standard for user assistance?
There’s growing interest in establishing a standard for user assistance. Microsoft’s announcement that Vista will not include a new help viewer may be largely responsible.
Non-technical problems
Norm Walsh has posted a provocative discussion of DITA and DocBook on his blog (a writeup of a presentation he delivered at the recent DITA 2006 conference).
To DITA or not to DITA?
In a recent discussion on the STCCIC-SIG list, Mark Baker of Analecta Communications provided an excellent analysis of DocBook, DITA, and how they are not the same thing as XML. (The discussion is reproduced here with Mark’s permission.)
Printing and economics
Before the invention of movable type, book publishing was technologically possible, but prohibitively expensive. Printing involved carving the contents of a page onto a wooden block — backwards — and then basically stamping that ink-covered block onto a page. Each wooden block was usable only for a single, specific page. Movable type, developed by Johannes Gutenberg and others, took the granularity of print technology from the page down to the character level. This innovation changed the economics of printing, and led to affordable books and the spread of literacy.
Joe Welinske on STC localized dues structure
This morning, Joe Welinske of WritersUA posted an excellent assessment of the STC’s localized dues structure to the ReformSTC list. I’ve reproduced the article here.
Google Print and copyright law
The advances in digital rights management lead to the restriction or elimination of fair use rights. It’s interesting that the Google Print program resides at the opposite extreme.
A different perspective on digital rights
This week is apparently DRM Week here at Palimpsest…
Was it something Adobe said?
First, Microsoft announces Metro, the alleged “PDF Killer.” Now, we have Acrylic, which is supposed to take on Photoshop and possibly Illustrator.
Making Friends with XSL
I have a pattern of learning things The Hard Way. That is, get a book, dive in, and just do it. Eventually, some order emerges from the chaos, and one day, it all starts to make sense. This approach has failed once or twice — my ill-fated attempts to learn Perl come to mind.