Text insets (Martin Ley)

[Scott Prentice]

Hi Austin...

Regarding your big question .. the concept of "text insets" is certainly 
available in other forms. DITA provides the concept of "conrefs" 
(content references) that do one up on standard FM insets in that they 
can reference any level of object granularity, not just a whole file. 
And with DITA 1.2 comes the concept of the "coderef" which lets you have 
an "inset" to a file that contains live code, not just content from 
another DITA document. As for Internet coding .. most server side 
scripting languages provide the concept of an "include" which is 
essentially an "inset" to another file, pulling in the content of one 
file into another. You can also use AJAX to pull in content from a 
database or other sources into documents on the web .. or iframes can 
achieve similar functionality.

Don't get me wrong, Frame's text insets are great .. but this is 
certainly available in many other formats.

Cheers,

...scott

Scott Prentice
Leximation, Inc.
www.leximation.com
+1.415.485.1892



Austin Meredith wrote:
>
> We wouldn't even be able to use FrameMaker if it weren't for insets 
> (incorporations by reference). They work perfectly for us. Sometimes a 
> document of ours will have literally thousands of such live 
> incorporations by reference! --We rely on them the way a 
> programmer relies on calls to a Call Library.
>
>  
>
> Our big question is, when will the Internet people get smart enough to 
> "get with" insets, and finally grant us the same capabilities for 
> real-time-live-update insets in Internet coding (HTML, XML, etc.), as 
> have been available in FrameMaker?
>
>  
>
>