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Home > Rants > Goodbye documents, hello objects! > Modeling informative objects > What is an informative object? |
Informative objects occur at many levels |
What is an informative object?A piece of content that has a distinct name and purpose is an informative object. Examples:
Informative objects occur at many levels In architecture, the building is a large object containing smaller objects such as doors and windows, and those objects contain even smaller objects, such as door knobs, glass panels, and locks. Similarly, in content architecture, we have objects at various scales:
Strictly speaking, when we model information, we are always dealing with objects--some big, some not so big, some tiny. To a content management system, they are all objects. But as human beings, we come to content from a world of paper documents, so we are used to thinking of the large objects--the documents, or the web pages. We might continue to call those things "documents," but we are no longer creating documents. We generate content out of a vast collection of objects. |
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So what can we call the top-level objects?
And if we use that term for the high-level objects, what do we name the components?
In XML terms, then, every content object is an element, but the root elements are more important than other elements, which they contain. So I use the words object and element interchangeably. A Language Command Reference is a giant object. It contains several Language Command Groups, and each group contains an overview, followed by a series of Command Descriptions, each of which contains many components.
You reuse an object in many places Some objects, such as a product name, appear in thousands of locations. You want reusable objects so that you can write once, and use many times. Reuse is one of the major ways in which content management saves you money. But you can only reuse objects if they are rigidly standardized, so you always know what to expect, when you plug one into another object.
Next: Define each object. |
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