One of the samples of an EPPO topic that I included in my book was a topic from the WordPress Codex on the subject of Using Themes. One of the key properties of an EPPO topic is that it serves a specific and limited purpose. I identified the purpose of this topic as enabling the… Read More »
Fewer people read longer topics. But it’s not something to lose sleep over, and certainly not something to shorten topics over. Tom Johnson has a recent series of posts on topic length (Does DITA Encourage Authors to Fragment Information into a Million Little Pieces?, Do Short Topics Make Information More Findable?, and Why Long Topics Are Better for the User).… Read More »
One of the most important tools of modern business is the decision support system. Such systems can be complex and even exotic, but at its heart, a decision support system is simply a system that provides people with the information they need to make decisions. In tech comm, we don’t talk much about decision support. We talk… Read More »
In The Tyranny of the Terrible Troika, I complained that the now almost universal trio of concept, task, and reference did not properly represent what topic-based writing and information typing are really about, and I promised to show why each one, as popularly practiced, fails as both a topic type and as an information type.… Read More »