RE: Single sourcing vs. normalization

["Mark Baker" <mbaker -at- ca -dot- stilo -dot- com>]

Bill Lawrence wrote:

> I can see how this might work for reference material, because the tone,
> treatment, and audience all pretty much the same.  But how do you
> normalize material that has a very different audiences?

Actually, this is one of the key reasons for taking a general approach to
normalization rather than looking at the problem simply as one of single
sourcing. Two pieces of information on the same subject for two different
audiences are legitimately two different pieces of content. Audience is one
of the axes of content.

You may, as a matter of efficiency, decide that two different audiences are
sufficiently alike that their two axes can be collapsed into one. On the
other hand, you may decide that the two audiences are sufficiently different
that the two axes must be kept separate.

When you look at the problem purely in single sourcing terms, you may be
tempted to push the issue to far and collapse the audience axes too much.
However, when you normalize content you can recognize the audience axis of a
piece of content as you normalize it. The audience axis becomes part of the
model of the content and part of your normalization rules. This will result
in two pieces of content that convey the same information on the same
subject to different audiences being stored together. This has obvious
benefits in terms of maintenance. It also helps to make sure that each
audience is consistently catered for across your information set.

> Also, having
> used XML-based single-sourcing for some years, I find that it is
> difficult to assemble a book that appears seamless in this manner.  It
> is easier to assemble a help system, because there isn't necessarily a
> seamless linear flow.  Are you talking about help or books?

Technical books that are read through in narrative fashion are rare, so
achieving a seamless narrative is not always an issue. Certainly reference
material is easier to normalize than narrative material. As I said in a
previous post, for content that is appropriately narrative in structure, I
use identity markup to relate its content to the normalized content set.

The attempt to normalize narrative material, however, can often be
instructive. It can reveal all sorts of problems in the content. In some
cases it may reveal that the material does not need narrative treatment at
all.

A category between pure narrative and pure reference is the loosely linked
sequence. User's guides are often loosely linked sequences. There are
multiple possible ways of linking the material, and different products may
link different bits in different ways. The key to normalizing this kind of
material is to track the concept loading of each piece. That is, if topic A
presumes knowledge of topic B, the that fact must be modeled and tracked.
Once this is done you can work to remove unnecessary concept loads. When
concept loads are tracked, you can then assemble the content in any order as
long as the concept loads are respected.


---
Mark Baker
Stilo Corporation
1900 City Park Drive, Suite 504 , Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1J 1A3
Phone: 613-745-4242, Fax: 613-745-5560
Email mbaker -at- ca -dot- stilo -dot- com
Web: http://www.stilo.com

This message, including any attachments, is for the sole use of the
intended recipient and may contain confidential and privileged
information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure, copying, or
distribution is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended
recipient please contact the sender by reply email and destroy
all copies of the original message and any attachments.




^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

NEED TO PUBLISH YOUR FRAMEMAKER CONTENT ONLINE?
?Mustang? (code name) is a NEW online publishing tool for FrameMaker that
lets you easily single-source content to Web, intranets, and online Help.
The interface is designed for FrameMaker users, so there is little or no
learning curve and no macro language required! See a live demo that
will take your breath away: http://www.ehelp.com/techwr-l3

---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as:
archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot-  Visit
http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.