Re: What's the Difference?

[larry.kollar@xxxxxxxxxx]

Horace Smith wrote:

> Now that FM7 gives us SGML, can someone tell me or point me to a source 
> that tells what's the difference between a structured language and 
simply 
> following a template?

Chris had some good commentary about the advantages
of structured documents. Here's a sort of higher-level
FrameMaker-centric view of things:

Instead of using the paragraph and character catalogs, you
use an element catalog to tag your content. The neat thing
about the element catalog is that it (by default) only shows
the elements that are valid at the current insertion point.
For large documents that need to be consistent, it's a big
help... and for small one-offs that have a lot of formatting,
it can be a big pain. That's why, as Chris pointed out, you
can use FM+SGML for unstructured documents as well.

You can overload element names (programmer-speak) --
for example, I have a "label" element that gets formatted
in any number of ways depending on whether it's a label
for a section (sections can nest), task, alarm definition,
or any number of things. It helps to keep your catalogs
uncluttered.

The magic wand is called an Element Definition Document
(EDD) -- in SGML/XML terms, it combines the functions
of a DTD and a stylesheet. Creating a workable EDD is
something that you can learn on your own (I did it), but
if you go that route you should be mentally prepared to
throw out your first attempt or two & start over. If you're
starting with a standard DTD, FrameMaker can import it
and convert it to an EDD; you have to add formatting though.


Getting away from strictly FrameMaker for a moment,
another advantage to a structured markup language is the
ability to transform it -- a common example is to transform
to HTML to put a document on-line. HTML generated in this
manner tends to be much cleaner (less bloat, more  standard)
than exporting directly from Word or even Frame. Another
common transform is to a typesetting language such as groff
or TeX for printing. Frame, of course, does a pretty good
job of formatting on its own so you won't see Framers doing
that so often.

When you get a structured version of Frame, there's a
printed tutorial that walks you through using structured
documents, and an online Developer's Guide that describes
how to create or modify applications (what Frame calls
an EDD and a collection of supporting documents that
completely define a structured environment).

--
Larry Kollar, Senior Technical Writer, ARRIS
"Content creators are the engine that drives
value in the information life cycle."
    -- Barry Schaeffer, on XML-Doc



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