Single sourcing has been the watchword of technical communication for the last several decades. We have never fully made it work. A pair of seminal posts by prominent members of the community give me cause to hope that we may be ready to move past it. Single sourcing is about the relationship between sources and… Read More »
Findability is a filtering problem. There is a whole whack of stuff on the Web. To find what you want, you have to filter it. So if you can provide your visitors with a more sophisticated filter, such as a faceted navigation or a taxonomy-based browsing experience, they will have more success finding stuff, right? Not… Read More »
Tom Johnson started the discussion with Structured authoring versus the web. Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle took it up in Structured authoring AND the Web. My turn: Structured authoring FOR the Web. One of my long term grievances is that structured authoring has been adopted piecemeal. Rather than approaching it holistically as a method that can provide a wide… Read More »
I was flattered that my post Technical Communication is not a Commodity was used as a catalyst for Scott Abel’s discussion with Val Swisher, Jack Molisani and Sarah O’Keefe on The Changing Face of Technical Communications, What’s Next? I had a fair amount to say in the comment stream that followed to defend my assertion that… Read More »
I was rereading some material in the long-running do-people-read-the-manual debate (such as Tom Johnson’s If No One Reads the Manual, That’s Okay), and it struck me that there is an assumption that people on both sides of this debate are making which deserves some scrutiny. We all assume that technical documentation operates at first hand.… Read More »