I just installed a wireless mouse on my PC here in the office. The instructions that came with the mouse have some interesting turns of phrase, including this gem:
[The mouse] combines with 27MH RF wireless technology, user-defined keys, and outstanding design, so that you can use it freely to improve your efficiency and enjoy your beautiful life from the high technology.
Yes, I often enjoy my beautiful life with high technology. Don’t you?
Norm Walsh tackles topic-oriented authoring and makes a comparison to art.
Imagine that instead of authors, we were painters. In the narrative style, a painter (or perhaps a group of painters) begins at one side of the canvas and paints it from beginning to end (from left-to-right and top-to-bottom). They may not paint it in a strictly linear fashion, but the whole canvas (the narrative whole) is always clearly in view.
Interesting point, and he uses an image of a Vincent Van Gogh painting, chopped into unattractive bits to illustrate what goes wrong in topic-oriented authoring. The flow of the picture is lost.
But what if your content more closely resembles something by Mondrian?
Writing useful technical documentation is really, really hard. Using a narrative flow makes it a little easier to ensure that you’ve got the big picture — missing information jumps out at you just as Norm’s chopped-up painting shows.
But topic-based authoring has advantages, too.
Do you need those connections from piece to piece or can individual parts stand on their own?
Are your documents Mondrian or Van Gogh?
I hope for your sake that the product you’re documenting does not resemble Jackson Pollock‘s work.
In this month’s issue of Inc. Magazine (which I read religiously), you’ll find a feature article on Anna Bradley, who runs a business called Criterion 508 Solutions. (Unfortunately, the full article isn’t available online until later this month, but you can see the abstract here.)
My interest in the article is personal — one of the Criterion contractors featured in the article is Brian Walker, who I know from his presentations on accessibility at WritersUA. Congratulations, Brian!
Web site accessibility has been in the news recently because of the Target.com lawsuit. (Target’s web site has major accessibility problems.) Ms. Bradley points out that making web sites accessible is inexpensive — certainly cheaper than litigation and horrid publicity (i.e. “Target doesn’t care about blind people”) — and furthermore, an accessible web site allows an organization to increase the number of customers that use the site. In other words, from a business standpoint, it’s pretty easy to justify spending money to ensure that more people will be able to buy things from you.
The announcements just keep coming from Adobe today:
Mars is the code name for technology being developed by Adobe that provides an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based representation of Portable Document Format (PDF) documents. (Mars page at Adobe Labs)
In the long term, I think this means the Death of Distiller. Other than that, I think my brain has gone into information overload.
Any thoughts on where this is going?
Most web designers are aware of Section 508 requirements, which in essence require web sites to be accessible to persons with disabilities. However, Section 508 applies only to companies that sell to the United States government. Provided you’re willing to give up the U.S. government as a potential customer, your web site could be completely inaccessible.
There’s growing interest in establishing a standard for user assistance. Microsoft’s announcement that Vista will not include a new help viewer may be largely responsible.
