[tech] information architecture for interweiving WCAG documents

Hi All

On our techniques call this week, several of us took the task of contacting
experts in information architecture so that we could map out how all our
various WCAG documents inter-relate, interlink, etc. 

Below is an exchange with a fellow I know that has quite a bit of experience
in this. Unfortunately, he is swamped right now with work but he offered
some preliminary suggestions in an email exchange I had with him below.

Blessings
David MacDonald
www.eramp.com 

-----Original Message-----
From: G. Ken Holman 
Sent: Friday, April 23, 2004 2:59 PM
To: David MacDonald
Subject: RE: Your phone call to us

At 2004-04-23 14:46 -0400, David MacDonald wrote:
>So we're working on the accessibility guidelines for the W3C. There are a
>number of documents.
>
>1) The WCAG 2.0 Guidelines (Technology independent principles)
>2) The Gateway (technology independent techniques)
>3) The Techniques specific (XHTML, CSS, VoiceXML etc) documents which give
>example techniques and show how to accomplish the principles laid out in
the guidelines (#1)
>
>These documents will have many interlinks to each other.

Makes sense.

>The W3C has a pretty good handle on XML but what we are looking for is an
>expert in "information architecture" who can get on one of our conference
>calls and discuss with us various strategies at managing the information so
>that we can have multiple views and flexible interlinking between the
>documents.

Pretty succinct advice: manage the information as a whole and write 
stylesheets to aggregate and/or syndicate the information from/to different 
publications.  When I say "whole" I don't mean "one big XML file" but 
syndicate "one XML file per thematic collection of raw information" for 
independent publications and using XSLT to aggregate from all necessary 
collections when building a piece of the output.

>How are your Guru skills on that?

I do it *all* the time as I believe that is the way information management 
should be done with markup.  All of the course delivery information is 
syndicated and aggregated in that fashion.  No databases involved, just 
text aggregation using markup.

>Would that interest you (if you are a content architect)?

As a contract or as a volunteer contribution?  My volunteer time right now 
is tapped out with chairing two subcommittees on UBL and being the 
international secretariat for the ISO committee on markup.

What specifically were you looking for as services from a content 
architect: defining the document models? writing the stylesheets?

Let me know, David.  Good luck on your committee!

......................... Ken

--
Public courses: Spring 2004 world tour of hands-on XSL instruction
Each week:   Monday-Wednesday: XSLT/XPath; Thursday-Friday: XSL-FO

Hong Kong May 17-21; Bremen Germany May 24-28; Helsinki June 14-18

World-wide on-site corporate, govt. & user group XML/XSL training.
G. Ken Holman                 mailto:gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com
Crane Softwrights Ltd.          http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/m/

Received on Friday, 23 April 2004 15:29:41 UTC