[oXygen-user] [oXygen XML Editor Blog] - A Short Story of Reuse

[oXygen XML Editor Blog]

oXygen XML Editor Blog

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A Short Story of Reuse

Posted: 07 Sep 2015 02:38 AM PDT
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AboutOxygenXmlEditor/~3/-bqdMBmNY0Q/a-short-story-of-reuse.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

     Give the smartest human in the world a piece of wood and ask him/her to  
make         paper. Give him/her no prior tools and it will take years to  
come up       with a decent process which would result in some brown almost  
usable thick piece of paper.      This blog post is about reuse, not  
necessarily reuse of tools and materials,       but reuse of knowledge.  
Humanity has evolved not because each generation is smarter       than the  
last one but because we learned to reuse and pass knowledge to larger  
and       larger audiences and from one generation to another.      Almost  
all tools 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.      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  
in other         forms, on paper or in some kind of digital form. So I  
would define         technical communication as a means of passing  
knowledge about using tools to a         larger audience.     Reuse in  
technical communication can be structured on many levels:                   
Reuse written content by publishing it to more than one format (PDF, HTML,  
EPUB,             MS Word).           It turns out that XML is perfect for  
publishing content in more than one format.               XML is not  
designed to be consumed directly by end users and its benefit  
lies             directly in this. Your XML content should contain all the  
data necessary for             obtaining all the output formats. So if you  
are using XML in your technical               content, no matter what  
standard or custom vocabulary, you can             safely check the first  
and most important level of reuse.                            Create larger  
publications from existing ones.           Either using an XML standard  
like XInclude or using standards with their             own diverse and  
powerful methods of reuse like DITA, or by performing custom              
techniques you can merge XML content in larger  
publications.                            Reuse content written for a  
certain tool to document the functionality and             behavior of a  
very similar tool.           In most mature XML standards like DITA and  
Docbook there is this             implemented concept of profiling which  
allows you to dynamically filter at publishing             time content  
marked with certain attributes from your original XML project.  
In             this way from the same XML content you can publish  
documentation for multiple             similar  
tools.                            Reuse smaller pieces of common content in  
more than one publication.           Again, using XML standards like  
XInclude or DITA specific             standards like content references you  
can create and maintain small libraries of               reusable XML  
content, then reuse these components across various              
publications.                            Reuse images and other binary  
resources in multiple publications.           Because XML content does not  
embed binary resources, these resources are             stored separately  
and thus they can be reused in multiple places.                     So  
these are what I consider to be the main selling points for using XML in  
technical       documentation. As usual any feedback is welcomed.

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