RE: [xml-dev] RE: Formatting Processing Instructions

["Len Bullard" <Len.Bullard@ses-i.com>]

I can't flame what isn't wrong, Betty.  

To be fair, IADS predates almost all of the hypermedia technology used
today particularly web tech.  It was an SGML system, had stylesheets,
etc.  It got dinged heavily about standards but there were no standards
to speak of except 8879 so the designers made smart innovative decisions
at the time it was created (originally a Unisys product called "IDE/AS"
out of which the 'green' version was created for the US Army.  That was
1989/90 originally which is a long long long time ago.  The fact that it
is still being used when almost all of the systems from that era aren't
means it was useful.  Originally it used SGMLS (possibly still in there)
and a DTD I wrote for it.  I don't know what they are doing now.  We
deliver the 2361 wps and someone is doing conversions.  The C-standard
is pretty good for this although there is still far too much legacy and
program specific markup.  Combine that with local authorities
("Blackhawk does it THIS way") who know Word and don't understand why
their layouts don't make it to the PDF, and it's a real job. ;)

That said, we once could justify a lot of things based on the complexity
of the printed/38784 families of technical document.  1000dpi,
two-column save every bit of white space possible documents need tender
care.  It just isn't true today.  The PDFs spit out of the B and C
standards are almost identical to vanilla HTML layouts so the claims
aren't as justifiable as they once were with the exception that having
your own code base is still the best security hedge.   We would do well
to step back and reexamine the original decisions for IETMS and digital
production of TMs.  What was so just isn't no mo'.

The challenge is managing the data and data relationships.  Here the
claims for the complexity of the document are still valid.  ID/IDREFS
are a daunting problem in organizations that take drawings and drawing
numbers, create Word documents and then hand these off to taggers.
There is no concept of late bound values such as WP numbers.  XREFs and
entity references quickly become a nightmare.  As I type this (tornados
hitting all around us), I am using the Larson viewer to print a hundred
or so CGMs so I can get their find number, discover where they go in the
doc, and manually tie the references together.  Why?  People who with no
concept of late binding and who manage their data backwards to producers
instead of forward to consumers.  I have to build my own tools to do
this which isn't all bad.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Betty Harvey [mailto:harvey@eccnet.com] 
Sent: Friday, March 02, 2012 10:28 AM
To: Len Bullard
Cc: Rick Jelliffe; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: RE: [xml-dev] RE: Formatting Processing Instructions

Len:

I noticed that as well about IADS.  A few years back I was investigating
the possible use for a client and set up a demo with one of their 38784C
manuals.  Getting the formatting and navigation correct required a lot
of
manipulation.  My client now delivers the 38784C SGML and the IETM Class
2/3 conversion from their manuals.

We abandoned IADS and went with a custom HTML conversion that actually
looks and works very nicely.  IADS had a really difficult time with the
Illustrated Parts Breakdown.  The linking was something that wasn't
accomplished easily in IADS.

Did some nice testing with taking the TIFF images and creating SVG with
linking internally into the graphic.  Worked really well.  This is
accomplished with CGM with very expensive software but with SVG the
software is either cheap or free!

I was pretty proud of what we accomplished.  With a $99 search engine I
was able to have the entire manual searchable and highlighted on all
hits.

I know IADS is free but it does come at a high cost when the stylesheets
and components are not based on standards.   (Len feel free to flame me
now|-)!

On another note since most organizations that have to deliver data to
both
commercial and DoD clients it would be interesting to take DITA and
convert it 38784C or other DoD standard.  I am sure someone somewhere is
doing this but I haven't heard of it being done yet (Maybe I will do it
in
my spare time).

Betty

> Rick sayeth:  "what PIs allow is a separation of concerns that reduces
> coordination effort"
>
> I opened an IADS document recently and discovered that in contrast to
> the fairly clean element/attribute coding of twenty years ago, it
> contained all processing instructions.  I didn't investigate further
but
> it made me think that Greg Geis finally tired of the SGML/XML
wrangling
> and commiteeizing, freaked out and went with the one bit of markup
that
> no one can argue about very well because they are invisible to the
> committee members taught to never look at them.
>
> Whatever else can be said about PIs, they aren't used for sharable
> items, and therefore, aren't arguable outside the local cube farm.
>
> len
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rick Jelliffe [mailto:rjelliffe@allette.com.au]
> Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2012 4:54 PM
> To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] RE: Formatting Processing Instructions
>
> We had a different use of PIs.
>
> We are testing transformations, and so we could that the output has
> the same number of text nodes as the input.  But the output untags
> many pieces of text.  So we replaced stripped tags with PIs, thus
> maintaining the text node boundaries and allowing the count.
>
> We could also use XML comments for this, but IIRC we use comments for
> other things.  So we could use XML comments and then add some
> signature string at the start of the comment value to distinguish the
> different kinds of comments. But why go to the trouble when XML
> already provides a second kind of free tag (i,e, PIs).
>
> I guess from a software engineering perspective, what PIs allow is a
> separation of concerns  that reduces coordination effort:  in the case
> above, we have a thorough but heavyweight schema development regime,
> so the requirements of testers could be accommodated by developers
> without needing to go to back to analysts and schema developers nor
> forward to presentation developers.
>
>
> Cheers
> Rick
>
>
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Betty Harvey                         | Phone:  410-787-9200  FAX: 9830
Electronic Commerce Connection, Inc. |
harvey@eccnet.com                    | Washington,DC XML Users Grp
URL:  http://www.eccnet.com          | http://www.eccnet.com/xmlug
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