What is Structured Content?
Structured content is content that is broken down into smaller pieces or chunks. The size of the content chunk is determined by and limited to the...
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:
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.
Documentation version |
Base topics |
Package 1 topics |
Package 2 topics |
Base model |
Yes |
No |
No |
Base model with package 1 |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
Base model with package 2 |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
Deluxe model |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Structured content is content that is broken down into smaller pieces or chunks. The size of the content chunk is determined by and limited to the...
Content mapping is a process to create relevant, informative, and up-to-date content for your audience. Content mapping focuses on providing the...
Content architecture is the study of structuring content so that it is useful, efficiently created, and designed to address audience needs. Content...