Meeting Dale Dougherty of O'Reilly Associates

# Dale Dougherty of ORA

Dale and I managed eventually to meet, and saw completely eye to eye about the need and directions for the web. Dale is prepared to go on supporting Pei's excellent work on ViolaWWW, and is keen to get other publishers involved.

## Background

Tim O'Reilly set up ORA initially in technical writing, but Tim and Dale soon moved into publishing. They have around 50 people now, split between offices in Cambridge Mass., and in Sebastopol, Sonoma County, California. ORA publishes a set of "Nutshell" handbooks, and documentation on Unix and X windows as an improvement on the default public documentation.

The company is a family-friendly organisation: they moved to Sabastopol because they liked it there, and they often work from home, while Pei works still in Berkeley.

## Dale's Requirements

Dale wants to establish a basic infrastructure of generally available browsers which can support electronic distributed information. He is not interested in making money from selling the software, but from selling information. He feels the current situation, in which each information package comes which its own incompatible viewer, is not what the public wants. The reader ought to be able to pick his browser of choice and then browse whatever information he has access to.

He also feels that readers ought to have indexing tools to hand so that they can make their own indexes of anything they can read, and organize and annotate it at will. This suggests the integration of server and client functions which Linda ____ (UPenn) pointed out was important.

I must agree with him that for writing to be as easy as reading is now, control of functions currently only associated with servers should be naturally part of the browser.

Dale would like to see Viola incorporating a generic SGML browser with style sheet editor. (Pei has done a style sheet already I understand). He would also like to see an outlining facility as a means of navigation.

## The Davenport Group

Dale has organized a number of publishers and computer manufacturers to get together and use common formats for technical documentation. The group incldues some big names in workstations (although Sun dropped out). They have technical meetings at which they are developing standard DTDs for technical documenation. Steve Newcombe of HyTime fame is a member of the group. I miessed getting to the meeting, but might make the next one in Sabastopol 16-18 August.

## By the way...

- The Univeristy of Texas High Performace Computing Facility is looking for a solution to its online documentation problem in a heterogeneous environment. James Almond is a contact.