Linking Outside the Box
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Track: Publishing, Deploying XML, Knowledge Management
Audience Level: High Level/Technical view
Time: Tuesday, November 15 11:00
Keywords: Content Repurposing, Cross Referencing, DocBook, Authoring, Stylesheet, XSLT, XInclude, XLink, XSL-FO, XML Publishing
Abstract:
When managing large technical documentation sets, the ability to cross reference provides huge gains:
- Cross references let you document information once. When information is needed in another context, a writer can cross reference to it rather than repeat it.
- Writers can specialize. Writers don't need to become experts on every subject when they can refer the reader to the best information on a subject.
- Update maintenance is easier because the information can be updated in a single place rather than several places. Also, link text can be automatically generated.
- Translation costs are reduced because there is less content to translate.
XML supports cross referencing using the ID/IDREF mechanism, but such links can't go outside the current document. What if the needed information is in another document? Hard-coded URLs are notoriously difficult to maintain, and the XLink standard has not been widely implemented.
The DocBook community has implemented olinks, a powerful and versatile cross referencing system that lets you wire together a collection of documents with maintainable links. By specifying just two attributes, you can link anywhere in a collection of documents. The olink system saves cross reference information for all documents in a simple XML database. At runtime, the XSL stylesheet reads the database, forms the appropriate URI, and generates up-to-date hot link text.
Olinks enable DocBook to deliver on the promise of true modular content authoring. If olinks are used for internal as well as external linking, then file modules can be small and valid, with no unresolved IDREFs. Modules can be combined with XInclude into larger documents, with the stylesheet resolving all cross references from the database.
Copyright: © 2005 Bob Stayton, Sagehill Enterprises
