Reasons to Structure

[Steve Rickaby]

Ok, I'll hoof in line and sinker. I recently wrote a series of articles on structured FrameMaker, and here's what I put under 'Why should I use structured documents?'. The ordering is not significant, and some points have already been covered by others:

. A much greater level of automation becomes possible, such as the context-dependent application of formatting [mentioned above].

. A document's structure can be validated, that is, checked against the structure definition and any errors and omissions flagged.

. Structure allows design devices that would be tedious and error-prone to apply in unstructured FrameMaker to be wrapped in elements and used much more easily.

. The ability to interact with documents at a structural level makes edits to the structure easier and less error-prone, as well as making objects like markers much easier to select.

. Formatting rules within the structure definition allow document content to be reformatted in response to structural changes, for example changing one element into another with a single command and having all child elements reformat automatically.

. Meaning can be introduced into document structures. For example, the documentation of a software programming interface might include name, interface definition, parameter definition list, usage and error messages for each procedure call. Such elements can be given descriptive names in the structure definition, and completeness can be checked and enforced.

. Locally-applied formatting can be removed by reapplying the structure definition to a document.

. Document contents can be repurposed much more easily.

. Extra information about parts of a document can be introduced through the use of attributes, data fields that 'belong' to elements but which do not appear in the document itself.

. Inter-working with document tagging formats such as SGML and XML becomes possible.

I see that I omitted to mention the obvious point that structure allows you to separate structure and presentation under two separate systems of control. 

-- 
Steve