Posts Tagged "DITA"

Guest Post: Why I Love Wikis

The following is a guest post by Neal Kaplan, a technical writer at Zuora, Inc. Another post about wikis? Why not! Wikis are great! Just to set the stage, I’ve been a technical writer for a while now, working for software companies in Silicon Valley. (In fact, I often forget that there are technical writers (Read more...)

Wiki Culture, Reader/Writer Distinctions, and Divergence from Structured Authoring

In my last post on wikis, Mark Baker added an astute comment: I’m not a wiki fan myself — I’m a structured text guy bred in the bone — but I am fascinated by the trend, and by the variety reactions to it. Wikis started more as a cultural statement than a technology. They were (Read more...)

Topic Chunking and The Broken Alarm Clock

It’s been about 9 days since my last post, and yesterday my colleague leaned over and asked why I hadn’t been posting — was something wrong? He himself has been working on a novel, so he hasn’t posted anything for a month. No, nothing is wrong. I always chuckle when I see blog posts in (Read more...)

The Importance of Chunking for Sorting

If you want to be able to sort information by various classification schemes, such as by most popular, or by role, or by problem, your content has to be chunked in a granular enough way to facilitate the various means of sorting. Consider a work that is one large book, with no chunks at all. (Read more...)

Arguments for and Against Tripane Help

My colleague Ben Minson wrote a post about why tripane help is a relic of the book-paradigm documentation age, and how it can limit us from taking advantage of other web technologies. See Why I Don’t Like Tri-pane Help. As a quick definition, tripane help is the standard webhelp HTML output that has several frames (Read more...)

Update on the Search for Enterprise Authoring

It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted about my team’s search for an enterprise authoring strategy. So far, we’re just as split as ever about the problem. It seems that you can go four separate routes: DITA, HAT, Web, or Wiki. Here are some of the paths and difficulties we’re encountering. DITA DITA (Read more...)