One-button publishing - the holy grail

A couple of weeks ago, a user asked why we couldn't post the Vista Developer Story as browsable docs online instead of in .chm form, and why we couldn't just click one button and get docs published online.

It's a good question. In my past life as a builder on MSDN Online, I used to deal with that problem first-hand all the time. The fact is that the barrier to getting docs to render online in the MSDN Online at this time is actually pretty high. MSDN Online docs use a rendering technology called MNP 1.5, which was developed in 2000 and 2001. MNP 1.5 involves a very complex site rendering system with cascading CSS and INC files, and pages are very sensitive to errors or issues within them. And the process for transforming pages from .chm or HxS files to browsable online docs is really elaborate and complex. Someday I should publish the "known issues" page if you're curious.

MSDN is developing a new site rendering system called MTPS that mitigates against these problems. It might be partially live as we speak - check out the MSDN site for more on that.

But the problem still exists: the bar for moving content from offline form to online form is more complex than it needs to be. It's not just a matter of decompiling a docset, templatizing it, slotting it into the toc and publishing it. There's a whole series of metadata attributes that need to be created, a set of decisions about management, rendering, ownership, whether the file is included offline or not...

*sigh* Poor, poor Microsoft, huh? But this really is a place where our story is weak. MTPS will help, and I can't wait to see where we move when that's available for us to use.