You may not know Bob Doyle by name, but you certainly know some things he invented. Even if you weren’t born yet when he came up with some of his inventions, they have changed the way you work and play. In 1978 Bob invented one of the first hand held electronic games, Merlin, featured on the cover of Newsweek magazine and selling 5.5 million units in 1980, making it the biggest selling game of the year. In 1984 he invented the first desktop publishing software, MacPublisher. Later he developed Skybuilders, a web publishing tool that led to the first podcast in 2003. He helped found Content Management Professionals, and a whole network of DITA-related web sites including DITA Users, DITA Tutor, and DITA Infocenter, among others.
Doyle says of DITA:
“DITA Is the embodiment of several best publishing practices – content reuse, single-sourcing, modularity, information typing, structured writing, minimalism, inheritance, specialization, simplified XML, topic-based, conditional processing, component publishing, task-orientation, multiple output formats, multi-channel delivery. It really has it all, plus it’s translation-friendly, which is pretty important to a lot of people since globalization is what can make a company more competitive.”
