Re: Directions for tomorrow's techwriting

["Simon North" <Simon -dot- North -at- synopsys -dot- com>]

> I invite your comments about my growing conviction that we will see a
> growing methodology shift driven by increased understanding of the
> benefits of creating documentation that is easy to re-use and maintain.
> It appears clear that this will in most cases be through employment of
> XML and repository tools based upon this technology. 

Would it be rude of me to say "dream on" ??? 

It isn't *that* many years ago when we used to write our drafts in pencil and submit them to the typing pool ... tech 
writers didn't TYPE, goodness no. Then we had DTP and everyone moaned about how useless tech writers were at 
layout and how we should leave it to the experts. I'm not querying whether we really want to go back to the Good 
Old Days when all we worried about was words on paper ... but getting real for a minute, SGML has been around 
since the early to mid 80s. As far as tech writing is concerned, XML is nothing new ... in fact, from OUR point of 
view it's actually a MAJOR step backwards. 
The maintainability of documents is, among other things, largely governed by the granularity (the size of the 
smallest part) and the thoroughness with which the parts are identified. In XML terms, this means the richness of 
the markup. I would very much doubt that you could really consider anything more than trivial re-use with just 10 to 
15 tags; you have only to look at DocBook and then a more engineering-oriented DTD to appreciate that this just 
isn't possible.   
XML is not a technology in itself; it is an enabler. As far as technical writing is concerned it, like SGML, demands a 
process-oriented approach. The key factors to it's adoption are the same key factors that underlie any process 
approach: discipline, organisation, fragmentation, optimization, to name just a few. Plastering XML tools over a 
chaotic process will just give you XML-tagged chaos. It might look like an improvement, but looks are deceptive.  
We've had style sheets for longer than I can remember, and XML is NOT the only technology that supports them. 
However, you have only to look at the absolute disasters that most Microsoft Word users create to appreciate that 
it isn't the tools that are the problem, it's the users.  

If -- and it's a MASSIVE if -- you can sort out your process, then it might be feasible to author in XML and then use 
XSL/XSLT to transform the XML code into a suitably formated document, yes. The same was possible 20 years ago 
using databases. Is this the direction technical writing is going? I very much doubt it. 

Is this the direction for tomorrow's technical writing?  I think not, and I desperately hope not; I for one don't relish 
the thought of spending the rest of my career with my face fixed in a sardonic grin and the words "told you so" 
glued to my lips. 

The reasons we started getting involved in formating and layout in the first place were that the "experts" did not 
understand our special needs and we were able to deploy a sub-set of their skills that generally allowed us to 
achieve minimally acceptable results. We accepted an 80/20 compromise (it's also the same principle behind XML, 
but that's another issue).  

Over the past 15 years or so, we have been migrating slowly from paper to screen, from local screen to LAN, from 
LAN to the Internet, from the Internet to the Web (they are not the same thing). 
The Web is based and built on 1960s technology. It is, in my very biased opinion, a brain dead prototype. Many 
people have locked themselves into the pathetically dismal capabilities of HTML "hyperlinking" (and, boy, what a 
dog's breakfast we have made of it too!), without realising how feeble it all is. Face it, any so-called 'hyperlink' 
system that actually requires you to physically locate the ends of the links inside the linked objects is so numbingly 
stupid that if it didn't actually exist you would be able to hear the laughing all the way to Andromeda.  

Sooner or later (most probably later as we've had the tools and technology to do so for more than 15 years), the 
Web will mature. Information delivery will become ubiquitous. 

To sketch my vision and hopes for the future would take far more than an already too long email message could 
cover, but in the short term, I think we will be looking more at the organisation of our information, and more 
closely at delivery methods (of which formating is just one aspect) not less. One day soon we will start to learn how 
to write distributed information, and we may learn how to link that information into navigable wholes. 
 
In the longer term (most of use will probably have retired by then), I believe we will look a lot further. As we 
address things like the Semantic Web and cross-media delivery, we will learn much more about information 
architectures. Formating (on paper) will pale into a background as the trivial issue it should become. Ultimately we 
will be more concerned with not so much how we break information up (re-use) as how we (re)combine it into 
information (topic) maps, meta documents and virtual documents. 

Can I get off my soapbox now please? I think I'm feeling a bit dizzy.

Simon North
Tech Writer and XML author   



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