If you haven’t read Project Mallard yet, read it now. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Matthew Thomas pointed me to DITA, an all-singing topic-oriented format from IBM. There’s a lot of complexity there, but it’s worth looking at. Some resources:
- Norman Walsh on DITA for DocBook
- Wikepedia addresses DITA
- IBM developerWorks: Introduction to DITA
- And a PDF: DITA Language Specification
Also interesting is that Microsoft is heading in a similar direction for Longhorn. What’s really interesting is that their content model looks an awful lot like DocBook. Some quick reads:
- On MSDN: Introducing Windows “Longhorn” Help
- On HyperWrite: Help.Longhorn – What is it?
A lot of people are having pretty much the same idea. I suspect the success of sites like Wikipedia have had a profound impact on how we all think about such things.
What I need now is to assemble a team of people to sit down and flesh things out. I need people who are out there writing the tools, and who have a strong idea of what sorts of things are going to trip us up in the implementation phase. I need people who are out there writing the content, and who have a strong idea of what sort of content structure is actually needed. And I need people who have ties to the Greater XML Community, and who can smack me down when I reinvent too many wheels.
