Structured Content
When speaking about content, people often refer to two types of content:
- Structured Content
- Unstructured Content
Structured content refers to content that has been broken down and classified using metadata. The purpose of this classification is to expose the underlying structure of the information. Structured content often refers to information that has been classified using XML but can also relate to information classified using other standard or proprietary forms of metadata. However, when used within the context of content management, structured content specifically refers to content that has been marked up with XML (or another markup language such as SGML).
Unstructured content, on the other hand, is content that has not been classified.
While the difference between unstructured and unstructured content may not be immediately apparent, you are probably aware of the pains that unstructured content can bring if you are a part of a growing company that creates many documents in Word, Framemaker, or similar word processing applications. Documents created with these applications do not employ validation against a set of rules (i.e., DTD or schema) as to how and where these tags could be used. Rule sets define where certain pieces of content can go. The lack of content structure leads to inconsistency across documentation and the inability to reuse content in an effective way.
Since XML describes the underlying information and its structure, content can be separated from its presentation. This overcomes a severe limitation of HTML, which merely describes content presentation for a particular set of HTML-compliant applications (like Web browsers).
Definitions
- Metadata
- Data about other data
