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Chapter: XML and Web Services : Building XML-Based Applications : XML and Content Management

How to Design the XML Content Environment

If you are building a Web content-management solution, you may consider coding the textual content in XML. That certainly is not a requirement. However, one of the advan-tages of coding content in XML is the promise that content can be recombined and repurposed to create customized content deliverables.

How to Design the XML Content Environment

 

If you are building a Web content-management solution, you may consider coding the textual content in XML. That certainly is not a requirement. However, one of the advan-tages of coding content in XML is the promise that content can be recombined and repurposed to create customized content deliverables.

 

Reusable Document Objects

 

If reuse is a major goal of coding content in XML, then the XML design should facilitate reuse. Here, the design should focus on the creation of small documents that contain con-cise topics. Because each piece of content can stand alone, it becomes a relatively easy task to combine pieces of content in new ways.

 

It is important to understand how you intend to reuse content and then to design the XML encoding and eventually the content storage to support that goal. Let’s suppose, for example, that our content is scientific journals. What is the element of content reuse in this scenario? At first, glance it is the articles. It makes little sense to reuse anything but a complete article. Our XML encoding for the journal should enable each article to be a small, reusable document.

 

But if we take a close look, we can imagine that two other elements within the article might be reused as well. The first is the art. Photos and illustrations might have a reuse value of their own. Likewise, tables that summarize findings in the article might have use as an independent content object. What can we do in our XML design to support the spe-cific reuse of these subelements.

 

Again, we must go back to the idea that each piece of reusable content is a small docu-ment. This means that each figure and table in the journal article is its own little docu-ment, is stored independently, and is called into this article or any other content-based product when the product is assembled for delivery.

 

XML Document Design Principles

 

Many times users of XML-based content-management systems come from an SGML background. Certainly conversion of data from SGML to XML is quite straightforward. However, the straightforward conversion of SGML documents into XML documents may not be the best design solution for data to be managed in a content-management system. If your original DTD was designed for a monolithic document to drive a print product, it most likely will not provide the functionality you want when you make an investment in a content-management solution.

 

Your content-management system will only be as flexible and versatile as the structures you impose on it. If you simply convert your monolithic SGML into monolithic XML (such as a large aircraft maintenance manual coded in compliance with ATA Spec 2100), you will end up managing the content as a large document that has very little potential for reuse in the future. Such large documents also have a huge impact on system performance.

 

An alternate approach to designing a monolithic XML tag set is to create small docu-ment definitions. Often times these small document definitions are based on an object model for reuse. Let’s consider a scientific journal once more. In the days of SGML, we would define a DTD for the whole journal. This would imply the journal issue, contain-ing all articles are managed and used as a unit. A slightly better approach would be to define a schema for the article. Then, we could call the article schema (and content stored on an article basis) as appropriate to construct the journal. We would store and use articles as independent information objects.

 

An even better approach would be to fragment the article into other useful objects or small documents that themselves might be reused. Here, we could envision having a schema for the journal that includes the schema for articles. The article schema might include other small XML documents such as the abstract, the citation header information for the article, the summary tables, and all graphics. Each of these content objects could then be managed independently, providing the functionality expected when we decided to use a content-management system.


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XML and Web Services : Building XML-Based Applications : XML and Content Management : How to Design the XML Content Environment |


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