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Subject:RE: Standards: Few & long vs. many & short From:David Artman <David -at- DavidArtman -dot- com> To:Jessica Behles <j -dot- e -dot- behles -at- gmail -dot- com>, techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Tue, 04 May 2021 16:25:14 -0400
Read even a brief overview of the DITA standard and you'll find that your gut instinct is a fundamental aspect of it: chunking content and building many, flexible deliverables out of those modular components.ÂYour current tools probably support such an approach, even if not using that particular standard.ÂKeys are, well... Key. Indexing, organizing, facilitating search and discovery by the users. Just like always. The only 'innovation' is that monolithic documents are the actual 'repository of actual source'; those are instead a deliverable built out of the real, source modular topics.ÂYou, thus, can have both worlds!ÂHTH,ÂDavidDCA:d.a.d
-------- Original message --------From: Jessica Behles <j -dot- e -dot- behles -at- gmail -dot- com> Date: 5/4/21 16:01 (GMT-05:00) To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Subject: Standards: Few & long vs. many & short Hi folks,I manage cybersecurity standards. Currently, our docs are extremely longand cover (in my opinion) way too many topics. I constantly have people(regulators, users, etc.) coming to me to ask in which standard they canfind x topic covered. I want to propose to my management breaking up thestandards into smaller documents based on topic (e.g. instead of broadlyhaving a single communications standard, have firewalls, networking, remoteaccess, and wifi standards). I feel that doing so will make them more userfriendly and I won't ever again have to answer, "Where are the firewallstandards?"However, I'm not sure if my management will accept my gut feeling(especially because prior to my involvement, we had the standards broken upin such a way, but somebody decided we had too many standards, resulting inthe hot mess we have today). So I was wondering if anyone had any dataaround few/long vs. many/short and which approach is better--articles, casestudies, etc. I've looked, but haven't had much luck thus far.Alternately, if anyone has any strong feelings either way, I'd like to hearthem--maybe my gut feeling is completely off base and I simply don'trealize itThanks!-Jessica^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Visit TechWhirl for the latest on content technology, content strategy and content development | https://techwhirl.com^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^You are currently subscribed to TECHWR-L as david -at- davidartman -dot- com -dot- To unsubscribe send a blank email totechwr-l-leave -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- comSend administrative questions to admin -at- techwr-l -dot- com -dot- Visithttp://www.techwhirl.com/email-discussion-groups/ for more resources and info.Looking for articles on Technical Communications? Head over to our online magazine at http://techwhirl.comLooking for the archived Techwr-l email discussions? Search our public email archives @ http://techwr-l.com/archives
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