[daisy] CMS/Dita 2008 - followup
Peter Dykstra
peter.dykstra at metaphorx.com
Wed Apr 16 15:34:48 CEST 2008
This is an extremely interesting line of discussion. It's gratifying
if my presentation at CMS/DITA 2008 prompted any of it, but it's also
clear that interest in Daisy has grown and is growing in other
quarters as well, including more widespread interest in the US. My
experience in putting the presentation together resonates with one of
Steven's points -- presenting Daisy in terms of a single use case does
limit it, since the architecture is general enough to support many
other use cases (which might have different benefits) equally well.
And yet the specific cases are necessary to demonstrate the product.
(To take this to the extreme, what you can do with Java is limited to
a large degree by your imagination. Yet one of the most powerful ways
to teach it is with cookbooks and sample applications. We are getting
to the point where CM frameworks are really high-level nth generation
programming languages. CM will be (if it's not already) just part of
the environment.
Case in point: though I use (and promote) Daisy, my presentation at
CMS/DITA was actually about the growth and maturing of Open Source CMS
tools in general -- it really just used Daisy as a prime example. But
because the demo was specific and concrete (and because of Daisy's own
merits of course), the part that people seem to have taken away was
the Daisy demo. (The rest of it was more of a ho-hum.) I also made
the point Michael mentions -- open source means 'no licensing cost',
not 'free'. A main rationale for the talk was to distinguish between
letting a thousand Wikis bloom and using the technology in a managed
way to support the publishing process (a no-brainer for the CMS/DITA
group of technical publishing people, but not necessarily for their
managers and peers in other disciplines.)
Steven and I have talked about Daisy and DITA (http://cocoondev.org/wiki/g5/562-cd.html
), and it would clearly have value for some, but somehow it doesn't
seem in the spirit of Daisy (it would be more of a 'Daisy-heavy').
Eric's other posts about the benefits of a more lightweight tool set
raise interesting questions; these suggest there will be a place for
non-DITA solutions, especially in more informal environments (or
conversely more structured professional environments) where validation
is not a requirement. (Example: the AP has had hundreds of reporters
filing stories from around the world for decades with a highly
developed stylesheet and formatting protocols in essentially a plain
text editor.)
I also look forward to continuing the conversation and seeing where it
leads...
Peter Dykstra
MetaphorX LLC
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2008 14:25:21 +0200
> From: Steven Noels <stevenn at outerthought.org>
> Subject: Re: [daisy] Daisy Summary/Overview/Why-You-Want-It
> Information
> To: "Daisy: open source CMS - general mailinglist"
> <daisy at lists.cocoondev.org>
> Message-ID: <1B6F050B-C919-4392-8886-5449DE0C129F at outerthought.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed
>
> On 13 Apr 2008, at 23:59, Eric Armstrong wrote:
>
>> I just posted the following entry at my blog. I think the
>> information needs to migrate to the website, somewhere.
>> After visiting the site twice, I had no idea of what it
>> was truly capable of. It's a story that deserves wider
>> circulation...
>>
>> Daisy: WYSIWYG Wiki for PDF Books
>> http://blogs.sun.com/coolstuff/entry/daisy_wysiwyg_wiki_for_pdf
>> If you need the collaborative aspects of a Wiki combined with
>> DITA's modular topics and publishing capabilities, then DAISY might
>> just be the system you need--and it's free. DAISY provides WYSIWYG
>> editing for Wiki pages that can be combined to publish books,
>> either in a PDF or as a single HTML page.
>
>
> Eric,
>
> cool post, thanks. And yes, you're right. We really need to spice up
> the Daisy landing page as people obviously don't get what it's about.
> OTOH, your perception might still be too limiting for others - in the
> sense that we're falling prey to the Flexibility Syndrome: there's
> simply too many scenarios we could address with Daisy, thus we fall
> back to a safe "reference" list of technical features rather than
> showing how Daisy can solve problems instead.
>
> I think anyone would love to hear more about your perception of
> Daisy, especially should you start using it in earnest.
>
> Indeed, I definitely sense a path of specialisation towards "DITA"-
> like contexts, while at the same time we have been building quite
> some nice website applications with Daisy, without ever feeling we
> were abusing the concepts of the system.
>
> Equally important might be providing a number of Daisy appliances:
> one for knowledge management, one for manual production, etc etc. I
> figure it's pretty much a chicken and egg problem for us: if we build
> these things, maybe people will come and generate revenue one way or
> another. However, it's non-trivial to postpone cash-generating
> activities in favor of this more "marketing"-oriented work.
>
> Contrastingly, I know that quite a few companies are using Daisy
> however don't share the burden of getting the word around (let alone
> share insights with this community). In an ideal world, people would
> be proud of sharing the same platform, and also be aware of the fact
> that free labour doesn't exist. I'm always hoping that a more design/
> marketing-oriented group or person would suddenly appear on the Daisy
> scene, but clearly that hasn't been the case so far.
>
> Let's continue this conversation and see where it leads us to.
>
> </Steven>
> --
> Steven Noels http://outerthought.org/
> Outerthought Open Source Java & XML
> stevenn at outerthought.org Makers of the Daisy CMS
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:08:03 -0700
> From: Michael Stivers <sti at qad.com>
> Subject: Re: [daisy] Daisy Summary/Overview/Why-You-Want-It
> Information
> To: "Daisy: open source CMS - general mailinglist"
> <daisy at lists.cocoondev.org>
> Cc: "Daisy: open source CMS - general mailinglist"
> <daisy at lists.cocoondev.org>, daisy-bounces at lists.cocoondev.org
> Message-ID:
> <OF0BE6C1CD.05E4260F-ON8825742C.00653689-8825742C.00691B66 at qad.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Regarding PDFs and Daisy:
>
> I would suggest that it would be worth investigating use of a PDF
> rendering engine such as RenderX or Antenna House rather than what
> comes
> with Daisy out-of-the-box (Ibex, or now Apache FOP). It can be
> frustrating
> to try to generate professional quality PDFs with the tools that
> come with
> Daisy by default. In any case, I expect you'd need some XSL-FO
> expertise.
> (I've been working with Daisy for several months now in the context of
> developing technical publcations at software company.)
>
> Additionally, as a suggestion -- we have found that having a separate
> content navigation document that is then imported into both the site
> navigation and book definition documents is useful because it allows
> you
> to maintain both at the same time. You can then create multiple
> content
> navigation documents if you wish, set up other book defintions, and
> so on,
> for greater output flexibility (and more potential confusion, too!)
> Although this approach is logical and somewhat elegant (to my way of
> thinking), it can be confusing to new users.
>
> I was at the CMS/DITA 2008 conference and found the discussion
> around the
> Daisy CMS to be quite interesting thanks to the presentation by Peter
> Dykstra. I would emphasize, though, that open source does not mean
> free,
> especially if you are intending to use Daisy in a professional
> technical
> publications / training environment. The are costs involved in
> implementing it, customizing it, getting your content into it,
> administering it, and so on. I would also argue that aspects of
> Daisy's
> authoring interface needs improvement.
>
> All that being said, Daisy offers an appealing semi-structured
> solution.
> You can establish some structure with the use of metadata fields and
> document types while at the same time not requiring authors to be
> experts
> about a complex schema / DTD. This opens things up to a wider
> community
> of authors, making a more collaborative environment possible.
>
>
> ---------
> Michael Stivers
> QAD, Inc.
>
>
>
>
>
> Steven Noels <stevenn at outerthought.org>
> Sent by: daisy-bounces at lists.cocoondev.org
> 04/15/2008 05:25 AM
> Please respond to
> "Daisy: open source CMS - general mailinglist" <daisy at lists.cocoondev.org
> >
>
>
> To
> "Daisy: open source CMS - general mailinglist" <daisy at lists.cocoondev.org
> >
> cc
>
> Subject
> Re: [daisy] Daisy Summary/Overview/Why-You-Want-It Information
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 13 Apr 2008, at 23:59, Eric Armstrong wrote:
>
>> I just posted the following entry at my blog. I think the
>> information needs to migrate to the website, somewhere.
>> After visiting the site twice, I had no idea of what it
>> was truly capable of. It's a story that deserves wider
>> circulation...
>>
>> Daisy: WYSIWYG Wiki for PDF Books
>> http://blogs.sun.com/coolstuff/entry/daisy_wysiwyg_wiki_for_pdf
>> If you need the collaborative aspects of a Wiki combined with
>> DITA's modular topics and publishing capabilities, then DAISY might
>> just be the system you need--and it's free. DAISY provides WYSIWYG
>> editing for Wiki pages that can be combined to publish books,
>> either in a PDF or as a single HTML page.
>
>
> Eric,
>
> cool post, thanks. And yes, you're right. We really need to spice up
> the Daisy landing page as people obviously don't get what it's about.
> OTOH, your perception might still be too limiting for others - in the
> sense that we're falling prey to the Flexibility Syndrome: there's
> simply too many scenarios we could address with Daisy, thus we fall
> back to a safe "reference" list of technical features rather than
> showing how Daisy can solve problems instead.
>
> I think anyone would love to hear more about your perception of
> Daisy, especially should you start using it in earnest.
>
> Indeed, I definitely sense a path of specialisation towards "DITA"-
> like contexts, while at the same time we have been building quite
> some nice website applications with Daisy, without ever feeling we
> were abusing the concepts of the system.
>
> Equally important might be providing a number of Daisy appliances:
> one for knowledge management, one for manual production, etc etc. I
> figure it's pretty much a chicken and egg problem for us: if we build
> these things, maybe people will come and generate revenue one way or
> another. However, it's non-trivial to postpone cash-generating
> activities in favor of this more "marketing"-oriented work.
>
> Contrastingly, I know that quite a few companies are using Daisy
> however don't share the burden of getting the word around (let alone
> share insights with this community). In an ideal world, people would
> be proud of sharing the same platform, and also be aware of the fact
> that free labour doesn't exist. I'm always hoping that a more design/
> marketing-oriented group or person would suddenly appear on the Daisy
> scene, but clearly that hasn't been the case so far.
>
> Let's continue this conversation and see where it leads us to.
>
> </Steven>
> --
> Steven Noels http://outerthought.org/
> Outerthought Open Source Java & XML
> stevenn at outerthought.org Makers of the Daisy CMS
> _______________________________________________
> daisy community mailing list
> Professional Daisy support:
> http://outerthought.org/en/services/daisy/support.html
> mail to: daisy at lists.cocoondev.org
> list information: http://lists.cocoondev.org/mailman/listinfo/daisy
>
>
> -------------- next part --------------
> An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
> URL: http://lists.cocoondev.org/pipermail/daisy/attachments/20080415/dca35188/attachment.html
>
> ------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> daisy community mailing list
> Professional Daisy support: http://outerthought.org/en/services/daisy/support.html
> mail to: daisy at lists.cocoondev.org
> list information: http://lists.cocoondev.org/mailman/listinfo/daisy
>
>
> End of daisy Digest, Vol 43, Issue 24
> *************************************
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.cocoondev.org/pipermail/daisy/attachments/20080416/1beeea58/attachment.htm
More information about the daisy
mailing list