Posted by mojavelinux on May 25, 2013; 12:26am
URL: https://discuss.asciidoctor.org/AsciiDoctor-s-content-strategy-tp237.html

To better understand the vision behind Asciidoctor--to promote the creation of reusable, human-readable, semantic content--I strongly encourage you to watch the following talk:

Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content
http://aneventapart.com/news/post/aea-video-karen-mcgrane-adapting-ourselves-to-adaptive-content

This talk is given by one of the leading thinkers on Content Strategy, Karen McGrane. She reminds us that the days of the single channel (read as "device") for delivering content (spanning news to documentation) have passed. Separating content from presentation, and weaving meaning into that content with metadata, is more essential than ever before.

As a content creator, you are faced with a choice. You can either write and design for a single device (e.g., print, desktop web, mobile) and watch your content get chopped up, recycled and watered down to fit other devices (Conde Naste), or you can invest a little extra time up front to write semantic, chunked content that isn't coupled to the presentation and watch your content flourish (NPR).

DocBook and AsciiDoc are both containers for semantic, structured content. Where DocBook falls short is that it's not human readable (not even close). AsciiDoc stands above DocBook because it's actually usable (and mergable and pull-requestable). AsciiDoc stands above other markup languages because it maintains a clean separation of content (not some messy plain-text, HTML hybrid like Markdown).

Storing your content in AsciiDoc is more than just an easier way to write documentation. It maximizes the *value* of your content. The lessons in this video will help us evolve Asciidoctor so we can inject even more value into the content.

I want to thank Sarah White for introducing me to this video and the field of Content Strategy. Heed her wisdom and go watch it!

-Dan

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Dan Allen | http://google.com/profiles/dan.j.allen