Today I attended a webinar by Mark Logic and empolis; each company works with content management, and together they presented a webinar discussing managing content in XML and reusing it. I must say, I had expected the webinar to be more advanced than it was. It introduced the concepts mentioned above, and provided statistics as to why these practices are useful when developing documentation, however apart from a short demonstration within empolis software, most was very basic. I suppose in essence the webinar was for technical writers who had not yet considered the benefits of using XML and centralizing content for reuse, whereas I had already spent much time planning a project to do so for my current employer.
I suppose to me it all seems rather self-evident – the idea that content should be written once, centralized, and kept in plain-text format for easy re-use across all formats. I certainly have not enjoyed having to update the same definition in several different places, or the constraints to the publishing templates provided within authoring software. There are only so many times one wants to copy and paste edits before realizing centralized content (and updates!) would make more sense. And coming across my mistakes, only to realize the mistake had been corrected elsewhere in the document but not here in this one, certainly was tedious. It was, however, the fact that the authoring tool I was using kept happily overwriting my custom CSS every time I published that almost drove me over the edge.
Even beyond the importance of easy updates and reuse, separating content from structure and design is seen as simple necessity within web design, which happens to be one of my favourite past-times. Using and separating JavaScript and CSS from XHTML or even XML is now the standard, and all serious developers seem to realize this. No longer can one throw together a mess of code and content and consider it professional. The result of separating them makes each work better independently, allowing the right people to modify the right tier (design, development, content) without upsetting the others. The designer can focus on designing the interface to be usable and accessible, the developer can focus on writing the functionality in, and the technical writer can focus on meaningful content; all without worrying about the other pieces. The structure can be changed, the design modified through a few simple magical touches in CSS, and the content is left no worse for wear despite new branding strategies and marketing plans.
Imagine writing the documentation once, and with a few clicks drawing it through to the cheat sheet, quick reference card, user guide, and reference manual, all at once. Even imagine drawing out the same content into marketing material – each brochure, website, and advertisement with their own style – graphics, typography, layout – designed carefully and updated easily without disturbing the copy.
This is one of the things user experience design dreams are made of.
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