detailed concepts

The following thoughts were initiated by reading this great post by Alan J. Porter on how traditional structured content is losing primacy.

Structured and formal content is not going anywhere. It is probably still as important to our ways of exchanging, archiving, and mutating ideas as ever. The rise of the web, of so much of the whole of human experience available to us at any moment has initiated a period of people using more content than ever before. But it's that smaller pieces of content are being used in exponentially greater amounts. 

I'll give a quick example that shows where this is happening. Let's say there's some new drug on the market used to treat farsightedness. pre-web there would be research building on theory, and then clinical trials, followed by approval, marketing, and use by the general public (ok this is totally out of my league, but I'm just throwing out an example).

Now, the process and documentation of bringing that drug to market were extensive as everything is required to be captured by law. Later, an interested individual would learn about the drug either through their doctor or a friend or advertising. If they had questions, they could ask those people, or maybe find information in some reference guide. Tho' it's unlikely that they could find truly detailed content unless they took up the search full time (or knew how to navigate pharmaceutical/medical references).

Today, all of the references are easily available to us. Personal stories about drug therapies are available to us. One can start reading and reading, and if necessary cross reference relevant technical literature, ignoring the bulk of the published literature. Without wading through the mountains of data you could search and find information on drug X and high blood pressure. 

Certainly in the pre-web days this information was available, but it might be pretty difficult to find. The web has enabled more people to access this information directly, leapfrogging all of the background or supporting words that only an expert would have consumed.

I believe that we must be cognizant that some of our readers are just looking for small nuggets of information; tho' this audience may only find what they're looking for with a search engine, and they would never use an index. 

Maybe a good question for the experts to consider is how DITA and other structured formats can optimize their content for search engine crawling and successful hits on a given query.