Modular Books

When you organize knowledge, you often think of the book paradigm. Books will remain ultimately linear, but that is because of the physical limitations of the medium. You turn pages one by one, text flows in lines one word after another. You can still access a discrete part of the book any time you want, though. Highly structured reference books, like this book, make this possible.

Information Granularity. The more information you have, the more granular it becomes. Large stores of accumulated information, especially electronic and printed information, have made individual records of details and facts more granular, more fragmented, and more disconnected from bigger pieces of information. Finding the piece of information you want is like finding a particular grain of sand on the beach.

SGML enables these fragments of information to be associated with one another through electronic document structures. Paper documents and books also need to be accessed by information modules, and this need is the impetus for making modular books.

The Direction of Books. Paper-bound technical manuals are nearly modular. They are highly structured so that you can read information not just sequentially, but rather modularly, as you need it.

This book, for example, has a great deal of structure, which helps make it modular. You need to access the information here in pieces, which are as small and precise as possible. That is why headings are used so frequently. It’s also why graphics and special formatting are used so often. Making information more modular costs less than making information monolithic and linear. See figure 29.3 for an example of a highly structured technical book.

Fig. 29.3  As you can see from the detailed table of contents, Que’s Special Edition Using HTML is highly structured in individual modules of information.

The challenge arises from indexing all these smaller chunks or modules of information. How do you label all these bits of information so that people can find them? How do you mark all that information? SGML offers profound solutions to organizing the electronic information of the world. Since electronic authoring already accounts for much of what appears in print nowadays, electronic structured authoring is not too great an extension of how authoring already occurs.

HTML is only one application of SGML. It is just one DTD, and look what it has done. The information on the World Wide Web is not accessible linearly, but modularly. If you do a Web search on stock trading strategies, you will find more sources than you ever imagined—thanks to indexing and SGML. The ease of modular access has lead to the popularity of electronic books on CD-ROM, which often use SGML for indexing. As information becomes increasingly available in electronic and modular forms, you’ll encounter difficulties from your habits of linear organization.

Implications of the Linear Way of Organizing Information

The linear approach to organizing knowledge can lead to bad habits. It causes you to think in outdated ways. These bad habits cause difficulties for you when you learn the SGML way of doing things. For example:

•  You discount the importance of document structure.

•  You forget about how users use information.

•  You neglect more creative ways of structuring knowledge in favor of putting everything in one proper sequence.

For example, if you wrote about maintenance tasks for OS/2 Warp, you would typically focus on the sequential order of the tasks. If you think about the structure of the ideas, though, you can relate them to the same tasks in other operating systems, such as UNIX or Windows 95. The difference is that you are thinking about the ideas as building blocks in different houses that can be compared with one another, not just with other blocks in the same house.

---

Note:  
The ideas you write in a book are building blocks that fit into larger frameworks of ideas, which are themselves building blocks in larger structures. When you start relating structures of ideas by the structures of their electronic documents, you are beginning to think like an SGML developer. For example, if you wrote a DTD for Operation and Maintenance Instructions for operating systems, you might want to include a document structure that allowed you to relate similar tasks between different operating systems.

Under the linear approach to organization, OS/2 Warp and Windows 95 might never be compared by how they handle file defragmentation, for example; each system would have its own maintenance manual, but unless you had both books on your shelf, their respective procedures could not relate easily to each other.

---

Another bad habit is that you can forget how users use information. You become more concerned with the sequence of the steps than with how the ideas themselves relate to each other. In the real world, information often resembles a tool chest. You do not always reach for the same tool first whenever you change the spark plugs. One day, you might use the wrench to take the plugs out. Another day, you might need to replace the wires and use the pliers first.

---

Tip:  
The information you use today and the information you need tomorrow might be identical but in a different sequence. Don’t commit yourself to organizing knowledge in a linear way. To be an SGML developer, you have to think about how your user can access it most easily. You have to understand that an OS/2 maintenance person might want to review the difference between HPFS and FAT disk formatting, and thus provide a document structure for making that comparison easy.

---