We've been using FrameMaker 9, 10, and 11 for several years now and suddenly on my machine Frame requires the first line of a DITA file to be
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
I know this may seem weird since <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> is pretty much required by the standards, but Frame 10 on my co-worker's machine does not require this line at the top of the file. Neither did my installation until yesterday.
Until yesterday having this
<!DOCTYPE topic PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DITA Topic//EN" "topic.dtd">
at the top of the file was sufficient for Frame to recognize display, edit and otherwise be nice.
Now, my installation doesn't know what to do with files lacking <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> and starting with <!DOCTYPE topic PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DITA Topic//EN" "topic.dtd">.
Since this is an erratic behaviour, I cannot prove that Frame has been happily generating files that lack <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> for at least 5 years, but since most of our files are generated in Frame it is extremely suspicious that we have a few thousand of them. And my co-worker's installation of Frame is still perfectly happy with them. (Nice puppy!)
Most likely everyone reading this has never exprerienced this and have no idea what's I'm talking about. But, before I write and test the script to fix this I would feel more comfortable if I knew what the h##l happened -- actually what the h##l is going on since the two installations are behaving differently.
It worries me that customers will run into this as well.
Before dismissing this as newbie nonsense you should know that I controlled the FrameMaker templates for Nortel for 10 years and have been using and debugging Frame since before it had tables. I'm totally snookered on this one.
Help? Hilf? A l'aide?
PS, It seems sloppy that we didn't notice the lack of the <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> before, but in my defense neither Frame nor oXygen complained before yesterday. oXygen is still OK with not having the <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> as the first line of the file.
Peter Fournier
samalander.com