Why Tópico?

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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.

Different types of publications

Tópico was developped to help you publish many different types of web document collections.

  • Personal, small business or special interest web site;
  • Electronic books online or on CD-ROM;
  • Reports as interactive document;
  • Software documentation files;
  • Small collections of standards and procedures;
  • Including XML content found in different files into a web publication;
  • Creating XML content for a dynamic website solution (Flash, ASP, PHP, ...)
  • Creating (X)HTML content for a custom computer based training program;
  • Prototyping larger projects;

Learn more about some types of publications you can create with Tópico.

Why Tópico?

From the many other options out there, why should I try Tópico?

  • It's inexpensive (even Free);
  • It's desktop based;
  • It's easy to install;
  • It's easy to use;
  • It's based on web standards;
  • It's flexible enough to fill different needs;
  • It creates usable and maintainable web documents collections;
  • It publishes your collections online or on CD-ROM;
  • It publishes your collections to HTML Help;

Tópico makes it easy to

Among many other things, Tópico makes it easy to.

  • Edit your collection's structure (map) visually through an interactive tree view;
  • Easily add a drop down menu, breadcrumbs, navigation links, site map and more;
  • Automatically add links to sub topics, along with their short description;
  • Apply accessible semantic markup with the XStandard XHTML editor;
  • Publish a news feed and select witch the topics you selected;
  • Publish your collection to compiled HTML Help and PDF;
  • Publish your collection online or on CD-ROM;
  • Filter, generate, reuse content and more...

Tópico also makes it fun to learn the latest web standards through many short tutorials that range from basic to advanced publishing concepts. Unlike hosted web based solutions, you have complete control over the publishing process and all your source files and unpublished content stay with you until you're ready to publish it.

Your safest option!

If you're if you're starting a web document collection, even on a tight budget, and you want to keep your options open fo rthe future, Tópico is your safest option to begin with.

You can't go wrong trying it. The worst case scenario would be to end up with a bunch of structured HTML and XML source files that you could edit in many other applications or transform to another format of your choice. All the source files used by Tópico are text files you could ultimately open in Notepad.

Although Tópico is not yet capable to solve advanced publishing scenarios and does not provide much features related to content management issues, it's a pretty safe place to start laying out any web project by ensuring your content is organized and marked up properly, using the same techniques that are leveraged by the larger solution you'll eventually implement if you're publication needs grow beyond your toolset.

Here's what Erik Wilde and Robert J. Glushk have to say about implementing heavyweight standards, such as required in large enterprise solutions at smaller scale.

"Heavyweight XML specifications such as those developed by OASIS, OMG, and other standards organizations are necessary to build robust enterprise-class XML applications, and Semantic Web concepts and tools are prerequisites for knowledge-intensive computation, but more lightweight approaches for structuring and classifying information such as microformats will do in other contexts."
-- Erik Wilde and Robert J. Glushko. XML Fever. Communications of the ACM, 51(7):40-46, July 2008.

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