Structured authoring

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1 Definitions

Structured authoring and structured content refer to development, deployment and management of structured contents.

“Structured authoring is a publishing workflow that lets you define and enforce consistent organization of information in documents, whether printed or online. (whitepaper on structured authoring)”

2 Discussion

Writing structured contents is more difficult than writing with an ordinary word processor, but there are benefits like:

  • Flexible publishing (books on demand)
  • Single sourcing for many formats and devices
  • Better support for search and data retrieval
  • Easy redesign of style
  • etc.

(more later, this article is just a stub)

3 Formats

The most popular formats today are:

  • DocBook and DITA for single source authoring (both text and online)
  • Latex, an older less structured format that remains very popular in science.
  • XHTML (mostly just to author web pages, though the language is rich enough to markup moderately complex documents.
  • E-book formats such as ePub (often XML-based)

For educational contents, see:

  • eLML (eLesson Markup Language)

Note: IMS Content Packaging just packs sequences in XML format. Isolated contents themselves (modules) are not structured.

See document standard for more

4 Links

5 Bibliography

5.1 Tutorials

O'Keefe, Sarah (2008) whitepaper on structured authoring, Scriptorium.com. There is a list of other interesting white papers in tutorial format.

5.2 Propaganda articles