I am a retired content engineer, and formerly used this blog to opine about the use of the W3C XML markup standard for developing and publishing intelligent, responsive content. But my second career is wet plate photography, which I document elsewhere. This legacy website address is: http://ditaperday.com/blog.
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Among the cards you carry with you daily, you are likely to have credit cards, loyalty cards, insurance and library cards, and more. Each one is associated by your name or other identifier to a member profile in a database. Besides your unique identifier, each profile of yours also records your level or role of membership in a group, your address, possibly some value or role that you represent to the respective group, among other data. A profile is a unique member record that describes how you relate to other members and to the group itself. You are a resource, and the profile is your resource description. And like a profile, a topicref is also a resource description. What kind of resource? Well, don’t let the name fool you. Topicref is DITA’s most versatile element!
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One of the elements that is unique to the linklist structure is also one of the least understood: the linkinfo element. The DITA 1.2 Spec itself merely says that it lets you “place a descriptive paragraph after the links that are contained in a linklist element.” But a linklist already allows the title and desc elements to provide description, so how does this element add anything more to the design? Naturally, there is something more to this story, something we can trace from the foundations of human culture, as it were. (more…)
All links can be seen as having a human-facing component and a computer-facing component. Computers need only the name of a resource in order to form a fully qualified URL or link to it. But human readers obviously need to know something about that resource in order to decide whether to navigate to it. This hint can be (more…)
Writing with a sense of lasting legacy means being mindful of how your information may be browsed and reused beyond the moment. One way to represent persisting sequence and structure is with lists. An unordered list of related links needs nothing more than linkpool as a container, but when sequence and sub-groups matter, (more…)
Every few years, as elections for government offices come around, voters come out to the election centers and line up to cast ballots for their favorite candidates out of a pool of names. The tally of votes represents a form of ranking and selection for that pool of candidates. Links are like candidates; (more…)
Each new year brings the promise of new beginnings. For my original DITA per Day blog at the contelligencegroup.com domain the past year had its share of bumps, and as a result the year 2015 will bring some big changes. (more…)
Anyone can put their ideas on the Internet, but not everyone does it well. That’s because effective publishing must negotiate between conflicting strategies. On one hand, there’s the desire to push the most information to the most people in the most formats in the most languages. That’s a nice goal, but can you provide the right information in the right format in the right language to the right person at the right time? Content that is personalized, easily found, appropriately scoped, and pleasant to interact with has a name: Adaptive Content. (more…)