ANNOUNCE: erlguten

[Ulf Wiger]

On Wed, 12 Mar 2003, Joe Armstrong wrote:

>  If you look at a newspaper the overall design is based on
>a smallish number of templates - where each template is a
>set of rectangular boxes (I guess most papers use less than
>20 templates) - indeed there should only be a small number
>of templates if the work as a whole is to have a consistent
>look and feel.

Working for a Big Company (albeit smaller than it used to
be...), where you're supposed to write technical
documentation in FrameMaker, using some predefined templates
(technicians write docs in FrameMaker, product managers and
marketing people use MS Word, making things even better), I
would _love_ to see a shift towards writing simple XML
documents and then transforming XML -> HTML, and XML -> PDF.

Not all documents we write need to be pretty (some do), but
all of them should be eminently searchable. Also, they need
to be version-controlled (and version control systems tend
to like text best of all.)

What I guess is needed to convince those of my colleagues
who are not vi or emacs fanatics, is some input tool that
gives at least a decent approximation of what the output is
going to look like (WYSINWYWGBCEFW*) and some simple
graphical aide that hides those scary XML tags. (:

/Uffe
(*) What You See Is Not What You Will Get, But Close Enough
For Government Work.

-- 
Ulf Wiger, Senior Specialist,
   / / /   Architecture & Design of Carrier-Class Software
  / / /    Strategic Product & System Management
 / / /     Ericsson AB, Connectivity and Control Nodes