Personal web publishing on your desktop
THESE PAGES ARE STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION AND DO NOT NECESSARELY REFLECT THE CURRENT VERSION OF TÓPICO
After going through the desktop publishing era in the '80s and the internet revolution in the '90s, the document has become much more than the "pretty printed" page desktop publishing has accustomed us to over the last 20 years. Today, the whole concept of the document is heavily challenged by the internet and the plethora of new publishing mediums (web sites, blogs, wikis, news feeds, mobile, ...).
While you were accustomed to print pages to distribute your documents for a long time, and will certainly continue to do in some context, today's personal publishing preferred medium is online, a trend that started over ten years ago with the creation of the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) by Tim Berners Lee
. HTML is the markup language behind all web pages you navigate to.
Now when you start to think of you documents as a network of related topics instead of a linear flow of information, it makes a lot of sense to also publish them as electronic documents (online or not), with links to internal content and/or external references that are available on the web.
Although available tools have been easier to use over the years, building a simple, usable and maintainable web document collection (a web site) still requires a lot of work. Organizing pages together in a cohesive publication with drop down menus, navigation links, breadcrumbs, site map, ... requires some knowledge about scripting and often makes the task a bit challenging for a great number of potential personal publishers.
Everyone who has maintained more than a few web pages for a while will agree that HTML markup, although human readable and editable, wasn't really meant to be encoded manually on a larger scale. While traditional word processors already support hyper linking features, their WYSIWYG heritage is so heavy that they're rarely suited for producing accessible and maintainable standard based web document collections.
In this collection, the term publication, web site and topic collection are alternatively used to describe about same thing: a collection of topics (or pages) that are published as a web site.
Up until now, unless you're already blogging somewhere on the net or part of some online community that use a Web Content Management System (WCMS), you were pretty much stuck into editing your content "visually" through your favorite editor or directly as HTML (in a text editor) for most of your online needs.
This isn't bad in itself but still leaves much of the publishing process (from the individual documents to a functional and cohesive web site) in the hands of the personal author. While hosted solutions are now commonly available for many of your online needs, working on the desktop for offline use haven't change much in all those years.
Tópico addresses this need by providing individuals with a lightweight desktop personal publishing system that is based on some of the best practices currently promoted by the W3C and that is flexible enough (in the hands of skilled publishers and web developers) to support features like automatic content generation, conditional text (filtering), along with some simple content reuse.
THESE PAGES ARE STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION AND DO NOT NECESSARELY REFLECT THE CURRENT VERSION OF TÓPICO
Sub topics
%product_name% was created to provide individuals with a simple desktop solution to the complex challenge of creating usable and maintanable personal web document collections.
Although online publishing with collaborative authoring is often preferred, not all document collections are necessarily meant to be accessible to the whole world over the web. Lots of other projects, from personal document collections (choose your topic) to interactive business reports can benefit from a semi structured publishing workflow.
%product_name% was created for three types of users with publishing skills ranging from basic to advanced. THis topic introduces these users.
Tópico for Learning Web Standards
Learning web publishing typically implies knowledge and experience with most of the standards used in %product_name%'s workflow.
%product_name% is built around the XStandard editor as it produces strict XHTML markup and offers a right blend of features for a simple topic oriented authoring and publishing system.
Learn about the requirements to run Tópico successfully.
View a side-by-side feature comparisons that highlight the differences between the available editions.
You can download the latest version of %product_name% from the Formedia web site.
To get the most out of %product_name%, you might want to download and install the following free software from the internet, unless you already have your favorite editors for (css) stylesheets, (xslt) templates and xml files.
While the Starter edition is free for personal and commercial use, the personal, professional and developer editions all require a registration code to be activated.
Here's a list of questions you'll eventually be faced with, along with short answers that might help you.