Technical Writing Tips- Separation of "Content" From "Format" With XML in Technical Communication

Writers Needed- Make $200 a Day- No Experience Necessary!

By Ugur Akinci

Until very recently content of information was always a part of the format in which it was delivered. For over 500 years, for example, a book's content and the way a book looked were one and the same phenomenon. You could not think about a novel without remembering its cover, the fonts used on the page, whether it had pictures and photographs, etc.

That's why, some of the books I used to own as a young man sometimes still creates a wave of nostalgia when I see them on the shelf of a used-book store because the book, its content, its size and binding and dimensions, its front and back covers, the way it looked, and even (yes!) the way it smelled, are all somehow tied together in my mind to the life I had years ago. That's never going to happen with an XML file since its content can be poured into a dozen different formats, each equally valid and appropriate for its own purpose.

Popular word processing programs continued the illusion that content and format were one and the same by hiding the immense formatting that went on behind the scenes. One widely-used office text editor, for example, is so format-heavy that even if you save a totally blank file it still has a file size of over 20K.

Why does that happen? Why a totally blank text file would not measure zero kilobytes in size? Because even a blank document of that famous text editor comes with a lot of "default template" information about what the default page size and orientation should be, which and what size default fonts should be used for default body text and headings, etc.

Distributing content firmly attached to a single format became not only too expensive for mass production and distribution but it ceased being necessary as well. Today with XML (Extended Markup Language) we can separate content from format totally and reassemble it on platforms as different as web sites, mobile phones, PDF documents, e-book readers, catalogs, TTY devices, etc.

Managers love that separation because once a content is written and tagged on a topic-by-topic basis, then it can be reassembled at any permutation by applying different style sheets for different audiences. That drops the cost of production since it eliminates the cost of rewriting while makes the same content available in shapes and forms that could not be made available before.