I am new to this list. I was lurking for a while and I finally decided to show up.
My main interest in FrameMaker is for XML-documents authoring tasks. I am quite new to FrameMaker (few weeks experience, 7.2 installed), but I have a good background and experience working with XML technologies. The first impression when learning Structured FM is double: - An impressive tool. - Weird and complicated way of dealing with XML. Maybe the troubles I've found come from my inexperience developing structured applications in FM, but I cannot fully understand the aim behind the (so called) "XML-roundtrip" editing 1) I cannot understand how to clearly separate structure from presentation in FM. If EDD contains structure and presentation information we are against the main principles of SGML/XML document design!! 2) It seems like there are two placeholders for storing presentation information: Templates and EDD documents. This could be redundant, I mean, the same presentation definition data could be store on both places. 3) In addition to this, Template document could have structure associated with it (via importing EDD document). Then we get just another way of associating structure to documents, apart from the DTD specification!!). 4) When working with XML applications like DocBook, I don't understand the need for "Rules" just to change capital letters. It seems like FM is not working internally in XDocBook when you choose to work with an XDocBook application. In fact, the structure generated by FM is not even DocBook 4.x compliant. It seems to me that this roundtrip is trying to match a mature legacy product (Structured FrameMaker) with the new emergent XML technologies, but it is not intended for XML authoring (as its main objective). At this point, (it seems) it is easy to me to produce XML documentation (using whatever DTD I'd like) by means of more "developer-oriented" XML editors like XML_Spy or Oxygen together with XSLT+CSS style-sheets then all the burden of taming Structured FM for this purpose. I'm sure I should have misunderstood something in this picture, and that's the reason why I ask for the help of the experienced FM users. Thank you very much. Pedro Pastor Software Engineering Department. University of Alicante Spain
