Jon Udell talks about structured writing on his weblog today. It brought back some memories for me when he talked about cool things you can do if you author your content in a structured format (XML), and then can use XPath over it. When I was working on my Building Oracle XML Applications book, O'Reilly was strongly encouraging me at the time to use their handy-dandy Microsoft Word templates. I figure that I knew a decent amount about the Data-flavored use of XML, but was not so familiar with the Document-side of XML. I pushed back, and with a little of Norm Walsh's encouragement (he'd just finished a book in DocBook about DocBook for O'Reilly) I decided that authoring my book in XML was going to be a great learning experience.
Near the end of the writing phase, O'Reilly (who'd already encapsulated all of their rules for authors into their Word Templates) told me that I needed to make sure that:
- I always referred to a figure or example earlier in the text than the figure or example itself.
- Every figure and example had a meaningful caption
- No caption was longer than 60 characters
With my book's source in XML, I used a few handy XPath expressions to find all the culprits and had fixed the 20 or so problem areas throughout the text in a half-hour. I still don't know how I would have found and fixed those issues if I'd used the Word templates...
Since that time in about 1998, pretty much all of my authoring (except for email) is done in XML using XMetal. With XSLT stylesheets I can target blog postings, OTN Online styles, PDF, or other things. It's a big time saver for me. If you end up doing document authoring in DocBook using XMetal, drop me an email and I'll be happy to send you my stylesheets I've developed to make for a more WYSIWYG editing experience.
6:24:32 PM 
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