Re: Rumour: FM really is dead

[Larry.Kollar@xxxxxxxxxx]

> The baffling thing is that Adobe doesn't consider FM
> worthwhile.  How can that be?  ...

I'm not quite ready to carve Frame's headstone just yet,
but in some ways Frame is becoming less relevant.

I think Ronald Pierce has it right: the needs of many
technical writers have moved out from under Frame. In
many industries, long technical manuals are being
replaced by shorter topic-based documents with hyperlink
and search capabilities, printed manuals are an after-
thought if that. [I realize that for many industries,
this isn't the case... yet.]

In a world where documentation consists of a series of
short, loosely-connected topics, Frame is not quite as
compelling -- heck, even Word can handle short docs
most of the time. :-)  In a world where layout is no
longer nailed to a particular page size, indeed where
a reader might resize a window and expect the document
to reflow automatically, the whole WYSIWYG paradigm
becomes irrelevant and even burdensome. In a world
where documentation can be assembled from a database,
extracted, transformed, and displayed on several types
of media, binary file formats are a problem.

I have to hand it to Adobe's developers -- they've
probably done the best they can to keep Frame useful
in a changing world, despite an aging code base and
too-tight budgets. Worst-case, 7.0 has enough XML
support to migrate structured documentation to newer
tools. Best case... Adobe announces Frame 8 with
Unicode support and seamless XML capabilities, running
on every platform out there. Reality is probably
somewhere in between.

--
Larry Kollar, Senior Technical Writer, ARRIS
"Content creators are the engine that drives
value in the information life cycle."
    -- Barry Schaeffer, on XML-Doc


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