Part II
Document Analysis

6  Defining the Environment

7  Defining the Elements

8  Relating Elements to Each Other

9  Extending Document Architecture

Chapter 6
Defining the Environment

When you’re building your dream home, you don’t just start building the first house that drifts into your mind. You have to ask a lot of questions about what it is you really want. Imagine, you won the lottery, you’re out on some bluff that overlooks a picturesque valley on one side and a country lake on the other side. This is the site where you’ll build your new home. You’re visualizing your house among all the natural surroundings—how it will look, where your driveway will be, and what shape your swimming pool will be. That’s what the first step of document analysis is about: designing your SGML dream house.

Your natural surroundings for your SGML “site” are the myriad documents you have. Your surroundings also include your customers, or the people you’re preparing documents for. Your business or enterprise probably has standards or guidelines you must follow; those too are part of your surroundings. To be realistic, you can’t ignore how your documents will probably change in the future. All of these considerations, and more, make up your environment. To build an SGML “house” you can live with, you have to pay attention to all of these issues.

This chapter guides you through the process of defining your environment. Much of what is presented in this chapter is common sense, but still the process seems much clearer after you’ve done it once.

In this chapter, you learn:

•  How to prepare for defining the environment

•  How to decide the use of your SGML documents

•  How to define what standards and guidelines you have to obey as you conduct your business

•  How to come up with names for all your different types of documents

•  How to gather and examine examples of all the different types of documents you’re going to be using

•  How to determine how people use your SGML documents

•  How to anticipate how documents will have to change in the future

Preparation for Defining the Environment

As you work through these steps, be sure you have your group together. This is a brainstorming process. Your group should consist of everyone who shares responsibility for your enterprise. If you run a small Web site, then gather some of your faithful users around, or perhaps some of your fellow Web site entrepreneurs.

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Note:  
This chapter is primarily written for the big enterprise (say, a 30+ person publications department or a commercial publisher). If you’re a small enterprise, you can follow the same basic steps with no problem, except that you’ll probably get done a whole lot quicker!

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Bear in mind, some enterprises have to deal with thousands of documents of many different types and users and customers of every description. No matter how big your enterprise is, these six steps will be your milestones:

•  Decide how you’re going to use all the documents.

•  Decide what standards and guidelines you have to obey as you conduct your business.

•  Come up with names for all your different types of documents.

•  Gather examples of all the different types of documents you’re going to be using and examine them closely.

•  Pick out all the different types of people who will be using your documents and determine how they will be using them.

•  Anticipate how your documents will have to change in the future.

You’re sketching plans to build that dream house. If you don’t plan correctly now, you may have to rebuild it later. You don’t want to go through that with all your documents after they’ve been converted into instances of SGML DTDs.

Preparing to define your environment involves just thinking about the steps and rehearsing the scenarios of how this process could look in practice. You should be thinking about who your key people will be and what resources they’ll need to help you.

Decide How You Are Going To Use Your Documents

This step forces you to define your goals for starting an SGML publishing enterprise. There are a lot of different ways you can use documents, and more arise every few months as technology introduces new applications. Here are some ideas on how you might want to use the documents in your environment:

•  Database storage, access, and retrieval for research and reports

•  Hardcopy publishing for customer books

•  Commercial journal or magazine publishing

•  CD-ROM publishing

•  World Wide Web navigation with graphical browsers

•  Multimedia documents for training co-workers

•  Electronic co-authoring and editing of documents that are shared across networks

•  Interactive entertainment documents that get modified as users work with them

•  Standards documents that get compared with other documents for validation of content and structure

See figure 6.1 for an illustration of how this goal definition step could look.

Fig. 6.1  Decide how you intend to use your documents; consider all possible uses and tools.

This is by no means a complete list. It’s just a start. There’s really no limit to the ideas you and your group can have. Spend some time expanding this list of uses and mediums. If yours is a big enterprise, this step can take months.

Even with the many deadlines you currently may observe, everyone must follow standards if you are going to use SGML. Some publication departments deliver several dozen books each month. Commercial publishers often produce several monthly periodicals each month. You have to meet your deadlines and abide by SGML’s rules. So, don’t rush this step, and don’t be afraid to redefine your goals at some point in time if it becomes necessary.

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Tip:  
Don’t plan your existing deadlines for SGML resources that are not yet operational. Wait until your SGML system has a proven track record with many real document samples before you depend on it for meeting time-sensitive deliveries. And then give yourself much more time than you would using existing resources.

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