Structured authoring
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
- Thinking Outside the (Tech Docs) Box: Structured Authoring as Competitive Advantage, by J. Sorofman, The Content Wrangler, May 2008. This site has other articles on structured content.