TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
I think you're too fast to dismiss dynamically generated content, dynamically generated relationships, and dynamically generated links. At the same time, you don't say how statically created links in a "topic" (or whatever you call the unit that is a hypertext "page") are inherently better than any other static method of expressing relationships.
I can try and do it for you... By placing links in each topic, you can set up more dimensions of relationships... Topic A might have links to X, Y, and Z. Topic Z might have links to A, B, X, Y, and W. By going from topic A to topic Z, you might find a completely different thread in the link to topic W.Â
How is this inherently better than dynamically generating links? How is it better than dynamically generating content? Do you think these techniques can't add the same value -- that they can't increase the dimensions of relationships?
And if you were to dynamically generate trees (say, from the current topic, generate a tree that walks all the linked topics 3 levels deep), yet keep all the static links in each topic within that tree, how is that inherently less valid than jumping one topic at a time? In fact, wouldn't the generated tree reveal patterns in the links you set up? And wouldn't it give the reader the option to skip one or two topics away from the current topic?
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Visit TechWhirl for the latest on content technology, content strategy and content development | http://techwhirl.com