When I started my career in tech writing, it was the age of the writer. Tech writers tended to work independently on a single book for months at a time. Better, for many, they not only got to write the book, they got to design it and shepherd it through the publication process. At the… Read More »
I took a side swipe at the DIKW (Data Information Knowledge Wisdom) pyramid the other day, and included a link to David Weinberger’s excellent debunking of it, which concludes: The real problem with the DIKW pyramid is that it’s a pyramid. The image that knowledge (much less wisdom) results from applying finer-grained filters at each… Read More »
Summary: As content consumers, we love hypertext. As content creators, we still believe in content management, even after years of disappointment. Content management disappoints because it does not scale for culture. It is time to embrace hypertext instead. I should know better. Every time I put the word “hypertext” in the title of a post,… Read More »
One of the questions I am often asked about Every Page is Page One is whether it simply means write articles instead of books. But while articles are certainly much closer to the EPPO model than books, there is something more to EPPO than simply writing articles. EPPO is also about the relationships between articles/topics/pages… Read More »
I got a number of really good questions following my TC Dojo session on Bottom-up Information Architecture (below). I want to address the questions in a little more depth than was possible in the webinar. Q: I’ve attended multiple Every Page is Page One webinars. They get bogged down in theory but never explain what tasks… Read More »
Transclusion is pulling content dynamically from one page into another page. Rather than cutting and pasting text from one page to another, you create a pointer to the page you are borrowing from. That pointer is resolved at run time, pulling content from the other page when your page is loaded. Transclusion was a fundamental part of Ted… Read More »
Summary: Designing information for paper was largely about managing reference distance. On the Web, the reference distance is zero. A completely different set of design requirements apply. Linear information design Traditional information design thinking has always been linear. This is a consequence of the medium in which the vast majority of information was presented:… Read More »
A lot of the information design being done in technical communications today is what I think we can fairly call a linear/hypertext hybrid. Perhaps this is a necessary stage in our evolution from static linear paper manuals to dynamic hypertext information sets, but if so we have lingered in it far too long, and we… Read More »
Hypertext means more than just text with a bunch of links in it Hypertext is something of a neglected subject these days. Everyone is talking about the Web, but nobody is talking about the class of thing the Web is: a hypertext environment. But to neglect this essential fact about the nature of the Web… Read More »
What is the right word to describe a node of a hypertext? What should we call the basic unit of information that we present to readers? Is it a page, a topic, or an article? (I’m going to take it as read that the answer is no longer “a book”. If you disagree, that’s what… Read More »