Here are my notes from the lighting
talk
'beyond PDF' at the developer happiness days. There's a video
online
– I haven't watched it but I imagine
it's the usual incoherent ranting, apparently with added sound quality
issues, not to mention a touch of jetlag.
The intention was to:
-
Explain the big issue: we're not realizing the potential of the web
for eLearning and eResearch when lots of academic work is happening
in anti-web systems like MS Office.
-
Demo the ICE system for a technical perspective to show developers
how it might make them happy.
-
Rant about how technical people need to do more to help their
academic communities. Why are we pissing around with twitter and
building repository infrastructure while thousands of PhD candidates
aren't using styles to structure their thesis?
Three slides:
Beyond PDF?
The problem:
-
HTML is only accessible to most people in toy-scale applications
like blogs or small pages in learning system.
-
Services like repositories and VLEs don't typically deal with word
processing documents at all well.
-
Word processor vendors largely gave up on HTML export years ago.
-
But a large amount of academic content is still made in Word.
What am I doing about it?
-
Spent the past 13 years designing Word templates and associated
infrastructure and handing them out to the
needy.
-
Spend a lot of time trying to get large companies to care about the
web for their word processing users. In the last year I have talked
to Microsoft, Google, Adobe & Sun. Guess which one is the most open
to discussion, use the comments.
-
Trying to help with other open source projects like
Zotero OJS and
OpenOffice.org.
-
Now working with PhD candidates to help them change scholarly
publishing from the ground up.
-
What are you doing?
(I know David Flanders is doing stuff with Google Docs)
Some demos
-
The ICE
toolbar,
Surreptitiously doing the right thing.
-
Rapid feedback systems. Type in the word processor / refresh in the
browser.
-
Lots of integration points –
push to LMS, blogs and repositories.
-
Web services for
conversion. (RESTish
but not formally RESTful enough – we'd better work on that.)
-
Points to cover: embedded semantics
(chem,
geo),
generic structure,