Research and finding - Web Experience Toolkit (WET) documentation

Share and view ideas: Managing decentralized long documents

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Project lead: David Elisma

Current status: Open

Opened on September 18, 2018 and will be close to new input on May, 2019

The goal of this research project is to gather all the best practices about creating, publishing and managing long documents

Join in: how to participate

Submissions can be made public on the WET-BOEW Github website. Having Github is not mandatory to participate on this project. You may use any channels that work best for you.

Who is the focus of this research project

The research project will mainly engage:

Key questions for discussion

Your ideas are sought after around 5 topics:

Attend a meeting

Community meetings will take the form of code sprint every Tuesday from 9h30 to 15h30 at 200 promenade le Portage, Gatineau, Room 2D302. To join, contact Pierre Dubois, on GCcollab, on GCconnex or on Twitter via @duboi5p.

Location Date and time Venue
Gatineau July 9, 2019 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. 200 promenade le Portage, Room 2D302 (Service Canada)
Gatineau July 16, 2019 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. 200 promenade le Portage, Room 2D302 (Service Canada)
Gatineau July 23, 2019 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. 200 promenade le Portage, Room 2D302 (Service Canada)

What we’re working on so far

Use case and story

As a third party intermediary I am asked to keep a paper copy of many documents found on the website of a particular gouvernmental agency. Some documents are organized under one web section, others are spread accros different web sections.

As a content creator I need to manage and communicate updates of the long documents that I’m responsible to the different stakeholders in an easy manner. One of the main concerns I have in producing and managing long documents is the complexity and the extent of the content.

As a web publisher I am asked to publish content coming in a word processing software format as a dynamic web format. I need to make sure that I comply with the mobile-first approach, all the accessibility guidelines, plain language best practices, and usability design aspect.

Requirements

The purpose of this research is to figure out how long documents can be created, managed, updated and consummed by content creators, web publishers, web users and printer users.

Content must avoid to be repeated through several different HTML pages to ensure an efficient maintainability.

Content must be task oriented.

Ideas must be organized in hierarchy.

Content should be tagged in a way that we may assemble a print-friendly version.

The user should understand the content flow of a long document because of effective signposting by consistent use of appearance and layout through appropriate formatting. This requirement can help a machine make sense of a ducoment too in order to repurpose it into a different format.

When we use formatting, we need to comply with standards that are set by the person to whom we are presenting our document. In essence, this means complying with the Canada.ca Styleguide requirements.

Finally, we must also ensure that the document is accurate and is understood to say what the author intended, by editing, including radical editing.

Ideas of posible solutions

General ideas on how the issue can be solved.

Like:

Environmental scan

Solution component

Documentation on plain language and task oriented documents

Prototypes of long HTML documents based on the Consultation Profile page:

Prototypes of PDF generator from HTML content: