Introduction

Overview

The Digital Content Production Wing of APEX@IGP  explores a wide range of issues related to tagging, styling and processing digital content to make sure it has is useful and profitable now and into the future.

About the only content that does not have serious XHTML production issues or significant future value is fiction. Whether it survives into the future as print, a word-processor file or an ePub doesn't much affect the story-telling nature of the content. It gets undue attention because until 2012 that is all anyone could work with due the serious limitations of readers and devices.  

Nearly every other content genre has long-term, sustainable and extensible value. That means it should be produced in such a manner that production costs do not have to be repeated over and over.

The focus

The Digital Content Production Wing focuses on things many publishers have probably never thought about or read about coming from the world of desktop typesetting applications. 

Out in the noisy world of XML and publishing consultants you will hear the same old stories over and over again. About selecting the right XML DTD or Schema. It always boils down to just two choices. DocBook or TEI, with the occassional  

If you need to support DocBook, NLM or TEI because you have made technology investments in the past. Change to XHTML in production and transform the XHTML to support your existing systems until the content corpus has been corrected. 

Even worse, if you have delivery systems that use custom XML strategies or machine generated XML from systems like 3B2, Arbortext or DITA, now is the time to make the change.