undermining hierarchies in books (was Re: [xml-dev] How to do XMLdesign,

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

[Dare I open a multiple-Balisage-paper-length topic the day before a 
holiday?  I guess so.  And alas, I'll be in Germany for next year's 
Balisage, so... and again disclaimer that these are my opinions, and my 
employer would be surprised to hear at least some of them.]

On 11/27/13 10:31 AM, Michael Sokolov wrote:
> In my view for text (hypertext, whatever), hierarchies + some light
> linking seems to be a pretty good model.
Kind of.  Or, perhaps, wouldn't it be pretty to think so?

I live in the world of hierarchical texts, working primarily with the 
One True Format of O'Reilly 'animal' books.  We apply the same set of 
hierarchies ("+ some light linking") to a wide variety of conversations.

Beyond the core challenge of communicating technical information, we 
spend a lot of time minimizing reader surprise and maximizing 
expectations of consistency.  We tell authors that headlines have to 
come in the right sequence, that 'stacked' headlines without text in 
between are forbidden, that notes shouldn't appear next to each other, 
and so on.

(There are exceptional projects, of course - there are always 
exceptions.  We do occasional projects with completely different layouts 
and approaches. They are labeled as exceptions, or, if they find an 
audience, 'distinct series'.)

We've known for years that readers are less interested in our 
hierarchies than we are.  There are some readers who use the Table of 
Contents, the purest hierarchical guide to the book, as their primary 
approach.  There are some readers who plow through the text as a linear 
stream.  There are many many readers who use either the index or search 
tools to navigate, throwing off the guidance of hierarchy as they quest 
for particular nuggets of information.

For an example I can pick on, created with O'Reilly tools but not an 
O'Reilly book, you can explore my (just started) Tool by Tool, Skill by 
Skill at:

<http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000000882/index.html>

That opening page is the TOC.  It's generated from the internal 
hierarchy of the book, shows the sequence (such as exists so far), and 
likely acts as a clustering of search terms that will someday bring 
readers to the book.  It may also act as a source of confusion, however, 
as readers looking for combinations of search terms may want them 
together in paragraphs rather than TOCs.  The index page is even worse 
that way.

For me as a writer, the hierarchy is convenient.  It gives me a set of 
boxes I can define before I go to fill them, avoiding the blank page 
effect.  It lets me make sure that chapter structures are at least 
roughly similar.  I don't, after all, want to leave out the section on 
how to _use_ a tool.

For editors, the hierarchy is also helpful, allowing me to look at the 
sequence of a project, compare its flow to the others I've seen, and get 
a rough sense of how to tell the book's story to readers.

For production, the hierarchy drives layout.  There is still copyedit, 
figure illustration, and other classic mechanics, but the actual human 
involvement in the typesetting is purely tweaking.

So yes, we're utterly addicted to hierarchy.  Not just hierarchy - a 
single view of the project, of almost all projects.

And yet... that "book" is a web site, and for now at least I'm enjoying 
its being available as a web site.  So why the book hierarchy?

Readers don't really care about the hierarchy, so far as I can tell. 
What I have is anecdotal, but it's fifteen years of anecdotal, so I have 
some trust in it.  (Michael likely has better actual data from Safari, 
though I don't know if he can share it.)

* Many people read at least the start of a tutorial straight through. 
It's less about hierarchy for them than sequence, though having chapters 
helps them pick which parts of the later content they want to read. 
More advanced folks will skip around, especially skipping ahead. Once 
readers have worked through the initial sequence, future use of the book 
will be by reference.

* Reference works (which alas are largely dying in print and print 
equivalents) are either read by hunting through the sequence 
(alphabetical) or through the index.  I have known occasional people who 
enjoy reading reference straight through, but they have become rarer.

Our hierarchies can adapt to these situations so long as we stay in a 
"book" context - but books are (sadly) dying.  Like XML, they serve a 
particular audience very well, but a larger audience that used to be 
enthusiastic about books has wandered off to other options.

Those other options have lingering hierarchies, in site structures and 
in their usual underlying HTML, but readers don't tend to care about the 
hierarchies except as guideposts.

It's useful to know how StackOverflow lays out its pages, but visual and 
sequence cues dominate.  At least 2/3 of my StackOverflow reading 
happens thanks to Google searches sending me there, and an even higher 
proportion of my visits to similar sites.  Presentations are generally 
linear, whether shown as slides or video.  Transcripts allow the glory 
of full text search.

There's little need for a curator to create hierarchies around this 
content, however much I may have cheered for Yahoo! when they insisted 
on the value of human librarians.  (I still love it when librarians do 
such work, but it feels like a luxury that can't reach all markets.)

Maybe it's just that I'm shifting from editing books to building 
conference programs, or that I've spent most of the year shifting the 
way I see my job from explaining things to welcoming people.

I've lost my faith in the intrinsic goodness of book hierarchies.

I'm still using them, but I'm trying hard to ensure that I don't let 
them lock me into things that readers don't need.  (Distinguishing the 
readers who expect continuation of previous consistency from the broader 
audience of possible readers is a tricky problem here.)

So where does that take me?

I'm looking for ways to create new kinds of content - things that live 
outside of the printed page (or pretend paper-under-glass ebooks).  Some 
of that is live events, where hierarchy is already light, and some of 
that is in digital experiences.  I'll be spending much of 2014 figuring 
out how to combine the two.

I'm trying, though, to start out as book-free, as hierarchy-free, as 
possible.  I don't plan to throw out William S. Burroughs' style cut-up 
technical manuals, but I certainly expect to look for smaller useful 
chunks of content presented in ways that aren't just searchable, but 
support multiple navigation pathways.

* Heavy hypertext, not just light links.

* Small hierarchies for visual appeal and searchability, not large 
structures.

* Interruptable sequences.

We'll see how that goes.  I'll likely be using our hierarchical tools 
for a long time, and the conversations will be in a world built on those 
expectations.

(And yes, these questions also animated much of my Gothic markup 
conversation, though that was largely tied to long-past data experiences.)

Thanks,
--
Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com/