How our DITA Conversion Saved us 100 Grand, for Starters; A Case Study in DITA for Globalization & Localization
By Jennifer Linton, CaridianBCT
Ever wonder how converting to a DITA/XML content management system would play out in real life? What if we added globalization? What if it showed nearly $100,000 savings for the first two deliverables (in 9 languages)? This step-by-step plan, by Jennifer Linton of CaridianBCT (formerly Gambro BCT), tells us exactly how it played out for them. In Part One you'll learn how this multi-national, regulated medical device company planned its migration to a DITA CMS by identifying stakeholders and defining personas, establishing a high-level process and system requirements, developing a content model, and figuring out what to do with legacy documents. In an upcoming Part Two we'll cover future concerns, how they calculated cost savings, and the lessons learned.
In three of my four Restful Web columns, I've been describing the design of a REST web service for creating and managing web bookmarks. It's now time to get down to some coding. The major part of creating such a service is implementing the method of dispatching: how does an incoming HTTP request get routed to the right piece of code?
Today the computing world tends toward using XML for any and all formal specifications and data descriptions. The author, a big fan of XML, asks a blasphemous question: "Is XML totalitarianism a good idea?" In this opinion piece, Terence Parr, co-founder of jGuru, demonstrates that XML makes a lousy human interface. He also provides questions to ask yourself to determine if XML is appropriate even for your project's program-to-program interface needs.