Another problem with linear structures of information is that you lose some of your creativity in how ideas relate to one another. Creativity enables you to see how the information you want today is meaningful to the information you acquired yesterday. When you are locked in the linear way of thinking, you lose touch with fresh ways of presenting related ideas in groups.

If you teach someone how to do basic commands in an operating system command line, he learns faster when you relate the command to a similar command he already knows. For example, you might compare the dir command in DOS to the ls command in UNIX. Because most people who want to know UNIX know how to list a directory in DOS, the comparison helps convey information.

Creativity in relating ideas and their documents is perhaps nowhere better evident than on the World Wide Web. The HTML DTD facilitates and encourages linking ideas together by means of relating their document structures together. Making relationships between ideas from different document structures requires creativity. You must go outside the standard parameters of linear thinking.

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Tip:  
You can overemphasize order and sequence. Sometimes ideas have many different structures. Creativity also requires that you don’t obscure the information that the user might really need.

A lasagna recipe, for example, can contain many structures because the order of events is somewhat loose. Disarming a nuclear bomb, on the other hand, probably requires a precise, linear sequence. Likewise, the DTD for a government mil-spec manual will need to have more order and sequence than would a DTD for a newsletter.

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• See “How Flexible Should DTDs Be?” p. 261

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The Role of Format

Format is a holdover from linear thinking. Because it’s difficult to present ideas in a nonlinear way, there must be a way of setting ideas apart. Italics and boldface are useful for this. In terms of structure, a chapter heading shows a single idea, and all the headings beneath it are part of the chapter heading’s hierarchy. Format has been used to indicate structure—hierarchy, sequence, and occurrence. See figure 29.4 for an example of this.

Fig. 29.4  Different types of format indicate structural considerations, such as hierarchy, sequence, and occurrence.

Linear presentations of information depend highly on format. You can structure ideas in different ways, though. Suppose that you are discussing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s drinking habits. If you write the article for a magazine, you need to use formatted headings to differentiate one idea from another—“How Fitzgerald’s Drinking Affected His Fiction” and “How Fitzgerald’s Fiction Affected His Drinking.” If you write the same article for an online magazine or a Web page, you can show the same information in a completely different way. Format still exists, but not as much is required. Jump points replace headings. On an SGML Web page, you can turn off the highly formatted stylesheet and use a simple stylesheet with little formatting. See figure 29.5 as an example of these different types of stylesheets.

Fig. 29.5  Each window shows a different format and appearance of the same document. Structurally, the document has not changed.

Information organized linearly is less flexible than modular information. Format tries to compensate for this weakness. If you can deliver information to a client according to a modular structure—instead of as a linear string of facts—you do not need to depend on format as much. Format becomes cosmetic. You can even let your client choose the format—playful, business-like, or generic. This idea of optional formats corresponds to templates or stylesheets in popular word processors.

An SGML stylesheet is a formatting choice. If you write a letter to your mother using SGML Author for Word, for example, you can create and choose the ask4mony.prn, iluvu2.prn, or thx4mony.prn printout format options, which correspond to SGML stylesheets. Each format is different, but they all enable the native structure of your letter home to remain the same. The format can change to suit your mother’s moods and the size of your financial needs.

Formatting in this modular way becomes like a suit of clothes. You wear the ensemble appropriate to your needs. It does not change your identity. You are still your mother’s son, so to speak. Unfortunately, under the linear model of information distribution, the clothes make the man. The man becomes Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde, depending on what he wears, not who he is. Under SGML, the Jekyll/Hyde document could be designated as:

    <!DOCTYPE freakdoc SYSTEM "c:\pervs\freakdoc.DTD">

But your processing system could provide alternate stylesheets called, say, hyde.ssh and jekyll.ssh as appropriate. Stylesheets become a document’s suit of clothing that can change as appropriate to its audience.

The old linear paradigm relies heavily on format, whereas the new paradigm—discussed in Chapter 30, “Understanding the Information Revolution: The New Paradigm”—relies on document structure and uses format only as needed. Don’t rely on format too much, and don’t let it distract you from the content of what you want to say. Some people use format so much that it competes with the content. Their writing begins to resemble a cartoon. When you organize information modularly, you can remove either the cartoon text or the cartoon art. The meaning of the content is still apparent.

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• See “How Modular Information Drives the Information Revolution,” p. 513

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The role of format differs dramatically in the old and new paradigms. It is less important in the new paradigm, and structure is more important.