Wednesday, February 4, 2009

It's Been Awhile

It's been a long time since I've posted to this blog. Life and work have been a bit insane. Work-wise, I've been working on a very complex project that marries DITA modular architecture with a more conventional monolithic document approach. It's been an interesting excercise - one that I will discuss in more detail later.

Personally, my father passed away on December 17th. He was in ICU since the beginning of December, and had been ill for quite some time before that. Needless to say, blogging was the last thing on mind.

I did have a presentation prepared for the XML 2008 conference, called "Optimizing Schemas for Enterprise Content", which I had intended to attend, but couldn't make it due to my father's illness. Thankfully, Eric Severson graciously and adeptly stepped in for me. From all accounts, it was received well. The premise behind the paper is that schemas shouldn't be the end-all/be-all for constraining content models (e.g., validation). Instead, I offer other strategies for controlling content.

In the meantime, I'm getting back in the swing with the DITA TC, hopefully having more time to devote to moving the v1.2 spec along. I'm also working on a proposal for creating "modular DocBook." There are some interesting concepts I'm playing around with in the proposal. Hopefully, I'll have enough to present to the DocBook TC later this month.

So much to do, so little time.

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