Sometimes microblogging questions require macroblogging answers. Here’s the conversation: @arh: Did @hixie really call XML a “disaster”? Is #techcomm aware of this? http://html5doctor.com/interview-with-ian-hickson-html-editor/ @mbakeranalecta: @arh XML is a disaster. Bad implementation of an essential concept. So is QWERTY. So it goes. @arh: @mbakeranalecta Generally agreed. What concerns me are the #techcomm folks who think XHTML… Read More »
Every documentation tool has a built in information design bias. When you choose a tool, be it FrameMaker, DITA, AuthorIt, a WIKI, or SPFE, you are implicitly choosing an approach to information design. If you don’t understand and accept the design implications of your tool choice, as many people do not, you are setting yourself… Read More »
Today, I am announcing the launch of a new website, SPFE.info. [EDIT: Information on SPFE has moved to GitHub. See http://mbakeranalecta.github.io/spfe-open-toolkit/] The SPFE architecture is a design for building structured authoring systems. Why would the world, need such a thing when it already has DITA? Why have I spent the last 15 years or so… Read More »
Could the way we organize content actually be causing readers to forget what they have read, or even why they were reading? In a post on the Technical Communication Professionals Email List, Mike Tulloch provides a link to a study from Notre Dame that suggest that walking through doors causes people to forget things (http://newsinfo.nd.edu/news/27476-walking-through-doorways-causes-forgetting-new-research-shows/).… Read More »
Links are expensive. That’s a problem, because the web is, and always has been, a hypertext medium, a medium of links. Links, as I have argued previously, are the last mile of findability. Links are how readers move around in your content. More importantly, links are what keep readers in your content, rather than Googling… Read More »
Writers often express the concern that topic-based writing cannot handle the big picture. Topics, they complain, don’t provide a way to tie everything together. Thus users get lost in a sea of topics, can’t understand the system as a whole, and can’t figure out where to start. If you formed your topic set by slicing… Read More »
Search is somewhat like an airplane. If you go to a meeting in another city, the plane takes you most of the way. But the plane only takes you to the airport. The meeting is somewhere downtown. You need some other means of transport to take you the last mile to your meeting. I wrote… Read More »
The Web provides three basic modes of navigation: search, browse, and surf. Few web sites, and still fewer doc sets do all three well. The something extra? “Pick three and add something extra” comes from Peter Sheahan’s book Flip, in which he flips the traditional business motto “good, fast, cheap: pick two” into what he… Read More »
Noz Urbina asks, Is Communication Mired in the Past? Well, yes, obviously. Most of the tech comms world is still making books in FrameMaker. But also no, because the problem is more profound than the words “mired in the past suggest”. People get mired in things through carelessness or misfortune. They want to get out,… Read More »