Re: Real value: Thomas Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

[Michael Collier <mcollier -at- arlut -dot- utexas -dot- edu>]

I'll second the motion on the value of the work cited, and at the risk
of re-erupting the holy war:

Bill Hall (bill -dot- hall -at- tenix -dot- com) wrote:

> And given that the technologies are rapidly evolving, today's choice may
> not be cost effective tomorrow. As technical writers we all need to have a
> deep understanding of both paradigms and be prepared to discuss cross
> paradigmatic issues without holy wars.

It's correct that today's choice may not be cost effective tomorrow. But
choices are generally made on your current cost/benefit analysis, not
the future. This may seem short-sighted from some perspectives, but it
is also the most realistic, I think. 

I am sympathetic to the idea that whether the choice made is cost
effective or not, you are stuck with it for the future. On the one hand,
you can't be worried about the future value of your current approach
when producing documents for delivery "yesterday." On the other hand,
it's a good thing to plan (to the extent you can) to avoid
incompatibility problems with future docuementation tools and legacy
issues. (If I had a third hand, I'd be an economist). 

I believe the structured proponents may be perceived by the "just write
it and deliver it" side as trying to rush them into an future that may
never happen for them. I can see the skepticism about this, as I was
first investigating structured approaches for a contract I was on back
in 1992-93, and I thought the use of those approaches would be way more
prevalent now than they are. I am in a "just write it" environment until
a sponsor directs otherwise or the mountain of information becomes
unamaneagable with current tools, and I don't see that happening.

I think eight or nine years ago the structured paradigm (SGML mainly)
was promoted as a solution to the proliferation of proprietary formats
that were be getting out of hand at the time. Since then, PDF and HTML
seem to solve the problem for most customers, as they are creatable by
many authoring tools and viewable/printable by most operating systems.
I'm not saying those are structured approaches, but they do solve the
customer's immediate problem of having their documents in a format that
will be around for a while.  As for the authoring end, I think most
tools commonly used allow for adequate reuse and redirection of
information to other output formats as needed.  I find the concept of
structured approaches to document authoring very interesting, and I'll
always keep an eye out for them, but I do think the structured approach
is more a solution in search of a problem right now. That's not to say
we might not be using those approaches more at some point, but I think
it requires a major retooling that is not yet justified for most
organizations. 

................................................................
Michael Collier, Technical Writer                  Office: N546
Information Systems Laboratory      http://isl.arlut.utexas.edu/
Applied Research Laboratories: The University of Texas at Austin
Voice: 512-835-3408            e-mail: mcollier -at- arlut -dot- utexas -dot- edu
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