General Question about Structured Philosophy

[Guest]

Hi all,

After reading my previous question, I have realized I have a more fundamental question about the general philosophy of creating structured documents and EDDs.

I would like to get some opinions on this subject:

Is it better to have a smaller number of total elements, and to use a lot of "If"s that look at where these elements are located to determine the style for them.

Or, is it better to have many unique elements that each only appear in fixed locations, thereby being more strictly and clearly defined.

For example, a person could have one "p" element that is used throughout the document, but that receives many different styles depending on what Chapter, section, or subsection level it is at. Or, on the other hand, if the style is always different and unique depending on whether it is at the Chapter, section, or sub-section level, would it make more sense to just have separate elements called "pChap", "pSection", "pSub", etc.

What are your thoughts?

Of course, I know there is probably no real "better" on this, but I am wondering about the pros and cons of these approaches.  In my real-world situation, there will likely rarely be "expert users" working with Frame, so do you think one method is easier than another for an average Frame Author?

Thanks in advance!

Darren

[Guest]

It's best that you let the hierarchy and / or attribute values determine formatting, not separate element names. The content will be more reusable and easier for the authors to create content.

Tom Aldous

[Russ Ward]

Darren,

There is never a fixed, absolute rule. However, in nearly all cases, I'd have to agree with Tom. When your element names are the same, it makes it much easier to author content because your element catalog is much smaller and less confusing. Furthermore, it is easier to move content around... that is; it's easier to copy/paste without having to rename a bunch of elements. There may be some situations where a very semantic and contextual markup might be required for whatever reason, but if you are just dealing with styles and formatting, I can hardly think of any value to a large element catalog.

If you are concerned that you might be missing out on the chance to store valuable metadata, keep in mind that lots of information is stored inherently by structural relationships, not just in your element names. For example, you could name your chapter-level paragraphs "pChap", but regardless of the name, they will always be identifiable as chapter-level paragraphs based on their location on the structure tree. Therefore, the more specific name really seems like extraneous overhead to me.

Russ