It is easy to think of metadata as a few information fields that you tack onto an article when you submit it to a CMS. In this vision, metadata is something fairly small, a triviality in comparison to the content itself. The reality is just the opposite; for any piece of content or data, the… Read More »
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 »
Summary: Today there is no “right place” to put information that will ensure that readers find it. Instead, we have to focus on making sure our content gets filtered in to the reader’s search. Every Page is Page One information design and bottom-up information architectures are key to achieving this. The “right place” for content… 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 »
One of the most difficult aspects of moving content to the Web is that webs are not organized like other things — books in particular. And the difference is not small. It is not that web organization is somewhat different from book organization. It is so different that you can’t even look at web organization… Read More »
A shibboleth is a test which separates friends from enemies, insiders from outsiders, the trustworthy from the suspect. In medieval England, it was easy to tell the nobility from the peasantry: the nobility spoke French; the peasantry spoke English. This is why our words for meat on the hoof are Anglo-Saxon in origin (cow, sheep,… Read More »
One of the defining characteristics of an Every Page is Page One topic is that it has no sequential or hierarchical relationship to other topics. There are no previous, next, or parent links in an EPPO topic, though there may be many links to topics on related subjects. One of the objections I often hear… Read More »
The Web continues to invent new places for tech writers to rehash old arguments. Recently I have been seeing a number of reiterations of the old debate about technical knowledge vs. writing skill on various LinkedIn forums, and apparently Techwr-l has recently been debating yet again whether it is easier to teach tech to a… Read More »
I recently wrote the following in a comment on Tom Johnson’s blog post What Tools Do Technical Writers Use: That writers are still expected to do their own publishing strikes me as one of the tragedies of the profession, and a major part of why tech pubs does not get the respect it thinks it… Read More »
All God’s creatures got a place in the choir Some sing low and some sing higher Bill Staines Traditionally, technical manuals have been written as if they were the only source of information on a product. Of course, the manual was never really the only source. There have always been neighbors, friends, colleagues, retailers, user’s… Read More »