SGMLXML.net A place for SGML and XML application developers.

A significant amount of time and energy has been spent by CMS vendors talking about the benefits of bursting or chunking monolithic XML documents into individual objects. The benefits that are touted are object reuse, lower translation costs, individual routing and approval workflows and the ability to enhance content instead of re-creating the bare minimum necessary.

For this to work it assumes that the organization or the individual creating and managing the content has consistently applied the concepts of reuse at each of the bursting or chunking levels. In practical terms, does each topic or section actually make sense as a re-usable object? Very rarely. More often there are a few sections/topics/paragraphs in a document that scream to be reused. In addition, these reusable objects can then be consciously put in a location for others to find and re-use. Thus in many instances, it seems more practical to provide templates that can be used to create re-usable objects where appropriate and leave the rest of a document a standalone monolithic object.