An Introduction to Single Sourcing – Part 1
By Justin Darley, January 2003
Section 3 - The technological framework
Database driven single sourcing
Database driven single sourcing identifies grains of information as fields within a database. These fields can then be identified and assembled using a selection of queries. It is not always immediately obvious that a particular solution is making use of database technology; often the workings of the database are hidden behind a graphical user interface (GUI). You may configure your single source project simply by checking boxes and making selections from lists.
Mark-up based single sourcing
Where grains of information are not identified as fields in database they may well be identified by use of a mark-up language. HTML, perhaps the most widespread mark-up language, is not of itself flexible enough to allow for single sourcing as described above. In HTML it is easy to identify that a piece of text is a paragraph, or a list, but how do you identify that it is a paragraph describing conceptual information? Or that one of the sentences in the paragraph is relevant only to Unix versions of the software?
What is needed is a mechanism to add more information to the mark-up. This can be done, for example, by supplementing the HTML mark-up with CSS classes. These classes can be intuitively named to identify the elements required:
<p class="ConceptualUnix">Information</p>
Alternatively a different mark-up scheme can be used. XML, for example, allows the creation of elements. This increases the flexibility and does away with the need for the kind of 'secondary' mark-up shown above.
<ConceptualUnix>Information</ConceptualUnix>
Next: Part 2 :- single sourcing tools and technologies.
Single Sourcing - An Introduction