The mark-up language used by the world wide web is easy to use and seems an adequate tool. It is easy to create documents with it. However, there is a wealth of existing information around. For cultural and economical reasons, it would be nice if they could be added to the world wide web without too much pain. The bad news is of course that the use of electronic text manipulation tools created a myriad of different formats and document models. The need to translate to and from various formats has grown accordingly and the difficulties are often underestimated. Also generating meaningful hyperlinks is another problem.
I will give a concise overview of most the problems associated with such a translation efforts of existing documentation based on research done in this area at Carnegie Mellon University and AT&T Bell Laboratories.
This talk is meant for the technical writers and web pages creators at large.