Dramatic Flow
Effective writing tells a story
Real Live Metadata
Aboutness 1st; format 2nd
Structured Authoring
Templatized writing for humans
Everything Else
This, at least, is miscellaneous
Featured posts:
Using a taxonomy makes you look again at what you are writing. You abandon information for its own sake, and instead shape content to fit your customers. Not only does their experience with search and navigation improve; what they find speaks directly to their needs.
Because structured content contains extra information, it takes extra planning and work to produce. The tools used to manage it can be costly, but the human changes needed to work with it can be even more so. It is essential that before starting a structured content implementation, stakeholders in the organization understand the benefits that they can achieve through it, as well as those they can’t.
Recent posts:
Using line-based diff and merge tools can result in invalid files or missing content. XML-aware merge tools avoid these problems.
The grammar police may criticise our doubleplusungood writing, but our loyalty should be with more plausible authorities — our global audience.
WYSIWYG wasn't just a comfort blanket. It helped writers do their jobs. For structured/web authoring, we can't go back, but must fill the gaps.
As tools designers, implementers, or authoring team managers, we have to do a better job of assuring authors when they're doing their jobs OK, and provide clear information on how to fix things if not.
Using a taxonomy makes you look again at what you are writing. You abandon information for its own sake, and instead shape content to fit your customers. Not only does their experience with search and navigation improve; what they find speaks directly to their needs.
Good visual communication is essential, yet graphics are often an afterthought in structured content implementations. We need a new approach to make them work well over an increasing range of screen sizes, devices, and contexts.
Well-thought-out content sets are like a good stew — each chunk has a distinct role. Carrots bring sweetness; potatoes, substance. In the same way, carefully designed information is served in purposeful pages whose structure reflects their intent.
An accessible way for authors, information architects, and schema developers alike to understand or refine a content model.
Because structured content contains extra information, it takes extra planning and work to produce. The tools used to manage it can be costly, but the human changes needed to work with it can be even more so. It is essential that before starting a structured content implementation, stakeholders in the organization understand the benefits that they can achieve through it, as well as those they can’t.
DITA makes things dramatically easier, but it does not remove the need to define your own processes and architecture. It was never intended to do so. You can't just fly your stuff from one place to another. The nature of the environment has changed. It's as dramatic as a frog's lifecycle from water to land. Put migration aside for now — your content needs to metamorphose, and you with it.
Does your home organization reflect your practices at work? A model for reducing document clutter shows parallels with enterprise content management.
Distributed version control could make collaborative XML authoring faster, more reliable, and clearer. But the piece that's missing from regular DVCS setups is an XML-aware merge tool. Project: Merge fills this gap. Here's how I got it working with Mercurial in SourceTree on a Mac.
WYSIWYG wasn't just a comfort blanket. It helped writers do their jobs. For structured/web authoring, we can't go back, but must fill the gaps.