Electronic Documentation, properly formatted data for electronic publishing

For a change, I will try to keep this article objective and to the point.  Yet I can't be objective about something I have not yet properly introduced, so lets talk a little about Electronic Documentation.

Electronic Documentation can be referred as any type of data that is published for electronic media, that may be the computer, a handheld, an email, etc.  Unlike printed media, electronic documentation needs to make sense not only visually but also semantically.  And this is actually the best concept to keep in mind when documenting anything electronically: SEMANTIC.

When you read a magazine or the newspaper you can easily spot what a title is, where a summary is present and the directions to follow to see the actual content.  You can achieve this without even reading anything, just by glancing at the page you can identify element sizes, colors, positions and overall structure and give a semantic value to each part, hence giving you an overview of what you are looking at without actually reading it.

Perhaps electronically you could do the same, you can visually spot any element on a given webpage and understand the purpose of a heading, a menu, a summary, a copyright, etc., so we could safely assume that we can visually understand the electronic document structure and decide what we want to focus on, however, in electronic documentation, our audience is not only visual, we are showcasing for a much bigger crowd.  We are no longer required to read through things to find what interests us.  We have help from technology constantly.  Most people begin surfing the web through a search engine, in this case, a Search Engine becomes one of your target audience (this is actually SEO but not the focus of this article).  People with visual disabilities aid themselves through the use of devices which reads through a given electronic document and dictates its relevant information to the user, this is another target audience, and so are more.  Your audience can't be limited to visual understand of a document structure as it happens with printed media, we need a way to properly define a document's structure through the use of non visual elements.

Lets talk semantics now ...

Whenever you are making a document in Word, or the software of your choice, most people type in their title, select it, make it bold, font type 25 or something like that, and maybe an underline.  Is this your case? If it is, you should know you are doing it all wrong.  By making a text appear like a title, you are not semantically making a title, you are just making it visually appear like one.  If you look closely you will find what many consider "preformatted text" which are in fact the proper way to make electronic documentation.  In Word this is called "Style".  You will find options such as "Heading 1", "Heading 2", "Paragraph", etc., these would appear to do exactly the same thing as changing the font type and making it bold, and visually that is just what they do, yet your electronic document structure is altered to consider this selection a heading or a paragraph on a semantic level, not visual.  Pergaps this example would explain the concept better:

This is a paragraph whose font type was increased to appear a title.

But this, allthough appears the same visually is semantically coded as a title.

The first example above is a standard paragraph in html, coded as <p></p> but visually formatted to appear a title.  The one following it, is visually equal, but was coded as a title using <h1></h1> with no visual modifications.  The document reader, in this case, the webbrowser reads the first example as a paragraph, so its semantic value is  a paragraph, it is only applying a visual style as you see.  The second example is interpreted as a title, and is displayed with the browser's built in formatting for a title.

Now you may wonder, why is this important? if they are visually the same, why should I care? Ah! like I said before, your audience is not limited to visual readers anymore.  Your electronic document can be indexed in a search engine, can be repurposed in a news feed or used as part of any service in the future, in any event, a robot is now trying to read your document.  This robot has no eyes, it can only read code, and as it reads your code, it identifies and assigns importance to each element it finds based on its semantic value, so an h1 will be more important than an h2 and both more important than a p (paragraph) and so on.

This is in fact the very foundations of today's properly coded websites and overall electronic documentation.  It is probably one of the most important Search Engine Optimization rules and it is in my humble opinion what sets you appart.  Making your documents semantically understandable not only you are doing the right thing, but you are making your documents accesible to the world.  In the not so distant future, when all libraries are fully digitalized, when all content is indexed and searched for a given purpose, your data will validate, it will be semantically correct and understandable and it will lead whoever is investigating what you documented access to your valuable writtings.

It is my belief, that those who do not correctly code their documents (it doesn't matter if it is a PDF, a word document or whatever you document in) will eventually go to the graveyard, because those who can't meet standards will simply be forgotten.

Thank you for your time reading, I hope you enjoyed it and learned something.

Jose R. Lopez

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Anonymous
Posts: 2

Electronic development
Reply #2 on : Sat October 17, 2009, 06:20:47

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Dear Jose I need all the help I can get and this article was so clear that even computer dumbos like me could understand it. And I was wondering if you or any of your readers would be kind enough to tell me where I can go to learn more - everything in fact.
I am coming to the end of a highpowered proofreading course with the in London and have been doing really well until a hideous exercise - a medical e-file has come my way and I am lost! I have the page proofs so that part of it is relatively simple, but if I really wanted to check headings spaces layout etc. I would be lost.

Just a small proofreading detail about this article: 'This is a paragraph who's font type was increased to appear a title' - should read - 'This is a paragraph whose font type ... '

Anyway thanks for this information and I am about to explore the rest of your site. Elena

JustAli
Posts: 2

Very helpful
Reply #1 on : Thu November 06, 2008, 16:27:25

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Thanks so much for this very clear and helpful information, Jose.
I'm going to send it to all the people I know who need a little help in this area... Which, come to think of it, might BE all the people I know! ;)