Topic-based authoring is a method of content creation where the content is organized around topics, which are then arranged and reused in many different contexts. It is not written in a chronological or narrative style, which means it is much easier to reuse and reorganize.
Topic-based content is useful in technical documentation because it is well-suited for technical documentation. Topic-based content is modular and therefore easier to manage, modify, and edit. Also, topics can be written so that their content is independent of other topics.
A topic is a single piece of content, or “chunk” with the following characteristics:
- It focuses on a single subject
- It has a unique and specific purpose
- It doesn’t need external content to be understood
There are content creation and content management tools specifically designed to support topic-based authoring, with many of them storing the source content in XML or XHTML format. SGML, though much less common in recent years, is still a format for source content. Whichever format is chosen to store topic-based content, the purpose is to give an organization a method to reuse, repurpose, and dynamically publish content.
For example, imagine your organization sold a product with four different feature packages. All versions had the same core content, but, depending on the feature package, each version would have different additional features. By creating and maintaining a topic-based documentation set, you would have a single set of topics that could be published into four different versions to match your four different product versions.
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Documentation version
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Base topics
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Package 1 topics
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Package 2 topics
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Base model
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Yes
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No
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No
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Base model with package 1
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Yes
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Yes
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No
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Base model with package 2
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Yes
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No
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Yes
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Deluxe model
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Yes
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Yes
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Yes
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