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<a style="color:#888;font-size:22px;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:none;" href="http://blog.oxygenxml.com/" title="(http://blog.oxygenxml.com/)">[oXygen XML Editor Blog] - A Short Story of Reuse</a>
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<a name="1" style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:18px;" href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AboutOxygenXmlEditor/~3/-bqdMBmNY0Q/a-short-story-of-reuse.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email">A Short Story of Reuse</a>
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<span>Posted:</span> 07 Sep 2015 02:38 AM PDT</p>
<div style="margin:0;font-family:Georgia,Helvetica,Arial,Sans-Serif;line-height:140%;font-size:13px;color:#000000;"><div class="body"> <p class="p">Give the smartest human in the world a piece of <strong class="ph b">wood</strong> and ask him/her to make <strong class="ph b">paper</strong>. Give him/her <strong class="ph b">no prior tools</strong> and it will take <strong class="ph b">years</strong> to come up with a decent process which would result in some brown almost usable thick piece of paper. </p> <p class="p">This blog post is about <strong class="ph b">reuse</strong>, not necessarily <strong class="ph b">reuse of tools and materials</strong>, but <strong class="ph b">reuse of knowledge</strong>. Humanity has evolved not because each generation is smarter than the last one but because we learned to <strong class="ph b">reuse and pass knowledge</strong> to larger and larger audiences and from one generation to another. </p> <p class="p">Almost all <strong class="ph b">tools</strong> that we use today are made up of quite a complex set of components which interact with each other. There is no one person in a car assembly factory who still knows all the pieces and how they come together. </p> <p class="p">Although using the tool is easier than interacting with all components which make it up, you still need knowledge to operate it and in this day and age having enough people to teach how a certain tool can be used is no longer an option. You need to pass knowledge <strong class="ph b">in other forms</strong>, on <strong class="ph b">paper</strong> or in some kind of <strong class="ph b">digital form</strong>. So I would define <strong class="ph b">technical communication</strong> as a means of passing knowledge about using tools to a <strong class="ph b">larger audience</strong>.</p> <div class="p">Reuse in technical communication can be structured on <strong class="ph b">many levels</strong>:<ul class="ul" id="topic_tjq_tcw_gt__ul_k13_qgw_gt"> <li class="li"> <p class="p">Reuse written content by <strong class="ph b">publishing it to more than one format</strong> (PDF, HTML, EPUB, MS Word).</p> <p class="p">It turns out that <strong class="ph b">XML</strong> is perfect for publishing content in more than one format. <strong class="ph b">XML</strong> is not designed to be consumed directly by end users and its benefit lies directly in this. Your <strong class="ph b">XML</strong> content should contain all the data necessary for obtaining all the output formats. So if you are using <strong class="ph b">XML</strong> in your <strong class="ph b">technical content</strong>, no matter what <strong class="ph b">standard</strong> or <strong class="ph b">custom</strong> vocabulary, you can safely check the first and most important level of reuse.</p> </li> <li class="li"> <p class="p">Create <strong class="ph b">larger publications</strong> from <strong class="ph b">existing ones</strong>.</p> <p class="p">Either using an <strong class="ph b">XML</strong> standard like <strong class="ph b">XInclude</strong> or using standards with their own diverse and powerful methods of reuse like <strong class="ph b">DITA</strong>, or by performing custom techniques you can merge <strong class="ph b">XML</strong> content in larger publications.</p> </li> <li class="li"> <p class="p">Reuse content written for a <strong class="ph b">certain tool</strong> to document the functionality and behavior of a very <strong class="ph b">similar tool</strong>.</p> <p class="p">In most mature <strong class="ph b">XML</strong> standards like <strong class="ph b">DITA</strong> and <strong class="ph b">Docbook</strong> there is this implemented concept of profiling which allows you to dynamically filter at publishing time content marked with certain attributes from your original <strong class="ph b">XML</strong> project. In this way from the same <strong class="ph b">XML</strong> content you can publish documentation for multiple similar tools.</p> </li> <li class="li"> <p class="p">Reuse <strong class="ph b">smaller pieces</strong> of common content in <strong class="ph b">more than one</strong> publication.</p> <p class="p">Again, using <strong class="ph b">XML</strong> standards like <strong class="ph b">XInclude</strong> or <strong class="ph b">DITA</strong> specific standards like <strong class="ph b">content references</strong> you can create and maintain small libraries of <strong class="ph b">reusable XML content</strong>, then reuse these components across various publications.</p> </li> <li class="li"> <p class="p">Reuse <strong class="ph b">images</strong> and other <strong class="ph b">binary resources</strong> in multiple publications.</p> <p class="p">Because <strong class="ph b">XML</strong> content does not embed <strong class="ph b">binary resources</strong>, these resources are stored separately and thus they can be reused in multiple places.</p> </li> </ul></div> <p class="p">So these are what I consider to be the main selling points for using <strong class="ph b">XML</strong> in technical documentation. As usual any feedback is welcomed.</p> </div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/AboutOxygenXmlEditor/~4/-bqdMBmNY0Q?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email" height="1" width="1" alt=""/></div>
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