Articles on Content Structure
[Sponsored Post] Adobe FrameMaker at IAR SYSTEMS: Better Updates More Often for Less Money
IAR Systems is a global provider of software development tools for embedded systems such as the logic components found in everything from mobile phones and microwave ovens to pulse-oximeters and antilock brakes. To provide the best service and value to its end users, IAR Systems implemented Adobe FrameMaker.
Algorithms: Separating Content from Formatting
Human beings can execute algorithms. Indeed, computer programs often replace human beings as the performers of algorithms. This is one of the reasons we turn to structured writing, so that we can hand over the tedious and exacting algorithms of writing and publishing to machines.
Quality in Structured Writing
Structured writing is not about assisting the machine. It is about enlisting the machine to assist the writer. And where the writer need assistance most of all is with quality.
Structured Writing: The Intrusion of the Management Domain
The management domain intrudes on structured writing, because, while the subject, document, and media domains are all about recording the content itself, the management domain is not about the content, but about the process of managing it
Structured Writing: Writing in the Subject Domain
You can write a recipe in the document domain. However, there are specific constraints on the format of a recipe that this approach neither follows nor records. If we want to create different document structures for different media, recording our content in the subject domain gives us that flexibility.
Structured Writing: Backsliding into the Media Domain
Moving to the document domain can allow you to factor out many of your media domain constraints, creating greater consistency at less cost, as well as providing a range of automation and validation options for your content. But it is all too easy to authors to backslide into the media domain, undoing all of these benefits.
Structured Writing: Writing in the Document Domain
The simplest reason for moving to the document domain is to enforce media domain constraints that are hard to enforce in the media domain itself. In fact, one of the consistent patterns in structured writing is moving to the next domain to enforce, or factor out, constraints in the previous domain.
With the advent and growth of digital media, technical communication and content management professionals are challenged to find better ways to produce and manage content. They aim use structured writing to produce reusable content more efficiently, reduce duplication and rework, and to support more efficient localization and translation.
Arising out of the development of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) in the late 1990′s, structured writing makes use of consistent rules of syntax, metadata, and markup to group and organize content into information types such as concept, task and reference. Authors who practice structured writing make use of approaches such as topic-based writing and minimalism to support the overall content structure.
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