A few months ago, we had an interesting discussion about structured content being like your closet. A few additional people wrote blog posts on the topic, too. One thing we all agreed on (I think?) is that structure provides a way for you to organize your content.
Now that we are pretty much in agreement on what structure is, let’s talk about the content that you put into the structure.
Content is Like Your Clothing
If structure is like your closet, then the things you put into the structure – namely the content itself – is like the clothes that you put into your closet. Shoes go HERE, pants go THERE, socks are in THIS drawer, and so on. It’s great to be able to sort your belongings. A place for every item. Every item in its place. I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of clothes (particularly shoes) in my closet. It is well-structured and everything has a place.
But not every garment goes with every other garment. For example, my bright red sweater probably won’t look good with my pink jeans. White socks with dress shoes are not an acceptable pairing in some circles.
Do you remember “Garanimals”? Garanimals were first created back in 1972 – and they still exist today (go figure!). Here is what our friends at Wikipedia say about Garanimals:
Garanimals is the name of a line of children’s clothing separates, started in 1972 by Garan Incorporated. Each item of clothing features a hang-tag depicting one of several anthropomorphic animal characters, also called Garanimals. The philosophy behind Garanimals is that by making it easy for children to choose coordinated outfits by themselves (by choosing pieces with matching hang-tags), children gain self-confidence.
Using the tags, children match up the pieces of clothing that go together. For example, you can wear a shirt with a lion tag and a pair of pants that has a lion tag. You know the clothes will match, because they have the same tag. All lion-tagged clothing is designed to be worn together.
Now, if that isn’t a terrific analogy for structured content, I don’t know what is. Gosh, they even use tags.
Reusable Content is Like Your LBD
What if I want an item that goes with just about everything? Something that I can wear over and over again, with any pair of shoes, any scarf, to any occasion Many women turn to a little black dress (LBD) as the ubiquitous garment that can be worn everywhere, with everything.
Think of content that can be reused as that LBD in the closet. Reusable content is content that can “work” in a variety of content outputs. Beware:
- Just because you have a structured closet, does not mean that all of your clothing matches.
- Just because you have a structured authoring editor and a content management system, does not mean that all of your content matches either.
Recently, I was working with a customer on putting in a CMS and structured authoring tool. When it came time to discuss changing and actually rewriting the content, the customer was completely surprised. He said, “I thought that the tools would automatically take care of that stuff in my content.” This is a well-educated person who has been in the technology field for many years. He did not understand that the structure is not the same thing as the content. And the structure cannot, by itself, automatically make the content reusable.
To make content reusable, you need to work with it. It needs to be written or rewritten with reuse in mind. For example:
- Very wordy content is harder to reuse. Why? Because sometimes all of those extra words are not appropriate in every context that you want to use this piece of content.
- Very specific content is harder to reuse. If you include specific product names, for example, and they are hard-coded into the content (rather than being variables), it makes it very difficult to use that content for other products.
- Poorly written content is harder to reuse. If I cannot understand your content in one setting, I’m surely not going to be able to understand it any better in three or four books/pages/and so on.
- Reusable content cannot rely on information that came “before” it or that comes “after” it, unless that information is included in the same chunk of content. You never know where a particular chunk is going to be used. Each chunk must stand on its own, containing all relevant information.
- Irrelevant information is harder to reuse. Same reason as wordy content. Sticking to the facts is very important if you want to reuse content.
Writing chunks of content for reuse can seem limiting, particularly in the beginning. And thinking everything in your document is unique and, therefore, cannot be reused defeats the purpose of using a structured authoring environment to begin with. You need to find the reusable content happy place – that spot where your content is skinny enough to be used in a variety of outputs, but detailed enough to actually say something meaningful. It takes time and effort to learn how to write in a structured way.
It also takes time to learn how to match your clothes.
Val is on the Advisory Board for the Technical Communications Program at the University of North Texas. When not working with customers or students, Val can be found sitting behind her sewing machine working on her latest quilt. She also makes a mean hummus.
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