Or, one can simply adopt standards...
First you have to find a standard that covers all the possible content you create: PDF, presentations, spreadsheets, word processing, images, project schedules, e-mail, archives, etc.
Then you have to get everyone who authors content to use that standard, including your partners.
XML is trying to get there, but that only partially solves the problem because the tags are user defined. XSL tells you how to display them, but not what they really mean, or how they relate to each other. Also the authoring tools have to do a good job with both the user interface (to make authoring easy) and the final tags used to represent that content. XML is definitely a good direction to take, but it's a long road.
Tom CF |
