Structured authoring and XML

Table of contents

Abstract

What is structured authoring?

What is XML?

The impact of structured authoring on a publishing workflow

Workflow options

Roles and responsibilities

Developing a business case for structured authoring and XML

Does your organization need structure?

Implementing a structured workflow

Summary

Workflow options

XML and structured authoring do not provide an actual workflow; they must be incorporated into a complete workflow. Before establishing a structured publishing workflow, you should consider the following tasks:

Defining content sources
Establishing content repositories
Implementing content reuse
Delivering formatted output

Defining content sources

It’s important to examine existing content to establish how it is currently developed and how it will benefit from structure. Other questions include the following:

Can all of the content be stored in a single location?
Is it necessary to keep different versions of the same content, or can information come from a single source?
Who develops the content? How often is it updated?
Are there dependencies between different sets of content?

The following table shows a simplified audit of content:

Information product	Current tool	Benefit from structure?	Dependencies	Updated?
User guide	FrameMaker	Yes		Twice a year
Training manuals	PowerPoint	Yes	Uses info from user guides	Quarterly
Online help	Dreamweaver	Yes	Uses info from user guides	Monthly
Release notes	Word	No		No
Marketing white papers	Word	No		No

Establishing content repositories

A content repository or database is not required to work in XML. However, a content repository makes it possible to manage content modules, which allows you to do the following:

Search content by elements and attribute
Locate content created by a specific author
Locate content by topic
Identify content chunks that are being used in multiple locations
Extract chunks that match certain criteria

XML works very well with content repositories; as a text format, XML is easier to manage than the proprietary binary formats of word-processing programs.

Structured authoring improves consistency across documents. This makes it easier to manage them in a content repository. Content can be automatically chunked at specified element levels, which makes content reuse easier (Figure 12).

Figure 12: Structured authoring with a content repository

Implementing content reuse

Content reuse, or single sourcing, doesn’t require an XML-based workflow. In XML, though, it’s easier to enforce the consistency that’s required to make content reuse work. Content reuse means that you develop a particular chunk of information once, and then use it wherever it’s needed. Reuse can occur across media—for example, a chunk of content is used in both the printed manual and in the online help for a product. In other cases, you might write a chunk of information that’s needed in several different printed books. Reusing that chunk minimizes maintenance and ensures consistency across all of the information products (Figure 13).

Figure 13: Content reuse minimizes the total amount of information being developed

Delivering formatted output

Structured authoring separates structure and formatting; this provides both the greatest advantage and the greatest challenge in the structured environment.

Authors are accustomed to working in a visual environment. Requiring them to work solely with tags is impractical, yet providing an approximation of the final output’s appearance will bias them toward a particular medium. For example, an authoring environment that looks something like a printed page makes it more difficult to consider how content will function in an online help format. Figure 14 outlines how structured information is processed to produce the final deliverable documents in specific formats.

Instead of working with commercial authoring applications, some XML developers prefer to use open-source tools. While it is possible to create print and PDF output from open-source solutions, it is generally easier to do so through commercial tools (which tend to produce higher-quality output).

processing structured documents to produce final output

Figure 14: Processing structured documents to produce final output

Next page:
Roles and responsibilities