Proof that content is more important than style

[Andrew Plato <gilliankitty -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

The "style vs. content" war is hot as ever. I have a new bomb to drop on this
argument:

As you know: accuracy is simply the single most important aspect of any technical
manual. Consistency, style, organization, design, etc. are all important aspects,
but still of lesser importance to accuracy. Thus, given the choice, a writer
should always favor accuracy and completeness over matters of style and
structure. 

Now, some people are just simply obsessed to madness that content and style be
given equal weight. The argument is usually: "content & style are of equal
importance, lacking either one makes for bad docs." 

This just isn't true. Its an emotional argument, not a logical one. There
literally millions of homely, poorly organized, inconsistent text files out there
on the Internet that are of exceptional value and trump any kind of style or
structure. This is in stark contrast to the handful of "personal anecdotes"
offered up here as some kind of "proof" that design is important. 

Here is my example: 

The thousands of RFC documents generated to outline networking and Internet
standards are exceptionally homely, inconsistent, and short on style. Yet these
documents form the technical foundation of one of the most valuable advancements
of the modern era. The entire Internet, the technology all of us are using right
now to blather about how important style is, is based on a collection of
exceptionally homely and poorly designed documents. 

HOW CAN THIS BE?!?!?!

If style truly was equal with content, then how could such homely documents
become so important? If the "style=content" folks were truly correct, then those
docs would have failed while pretty, FrameMaker generated, exceptionally well
organized, information mapped, PDF files should have succeeded. 

Yet this is not the case. In fact, there are plenty of examples of extremely
well-organized documents being utterly useless. And the real pain of this, is
that the owner of those docs paid big money to some "writer" to generate them. 

If the entire Internet can be based on ugly documents, then clearly content is
more important. The joke of this is, most scientific and technical documents are
exceptionally short on style and structure. Open any scientific journal and that
is blatantly obvious. And yet these documents - change the world.

You can scream, holler, throw a 1000 simultaneous fits, and post a billion
messages based on "personal experiences", but the cold, honest fact is: content
will ALWAYS be more important than style. 

Andrew Plato 


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