RE: Now is the winter of our dis-CONTENT (was Content vs. Style)

[John Posada <JPosada -at- book -dot- com>]

>>> Anybody else feel like sharing?

I agree with what you say that discussion of what we do in common (style,
formatting, and presentation) is much easier than our own individual
technologies. For instance...I'm documenting an EIA. Of the 4,000 on the
list...how many people even know what that means without going to Google,
let alone can have an in-depth discussion about it.

Let's try this out: I have a problem. I'm having a hard time documenting the
procedures that a technician must go through in moving an eGate deployment
that interfaces with SAP, from dev to con to prod. Do I create three sets of
documentation for each phase or do I develop a generic version and show the
differences through variable data and while we're at it, how do I present
rollback procedures after I've deployed the new DLLs that handle the
different stages of the deployment when it turns out that one of the stages
of deployment crashes...integral with the deployment or as a separate
document?

Now....there may be 10 people on the list who work with this technology and
product and I expect that I might get one answer, maybe two. However, I'm
not so much looking for a single answer, as much as many different answers
as possible from which I can take bits and pieces. 

I know of online discussion resources that I can access for this type of
discussion with several hundred people interested in EIA. However, while I
can discuss some of my questions there that I wouldn't discuss here, there
are some questions that are appropriate only here. This usually involves
getting the widest range of responses for issues that are common across the
range of technical writing. It is this list that I would expect the widest
range of answers about how to format wrapping code. On the other resource,
I'd discuss the content of the code because it there that I have a list of
people working with MY type of code. 

John Posada
Senior Technical Writer
Barnes&Noble.com
jposada -at- book -dot- com
212-414-6656
 "Be accurate...the 4am wakeup call you prevent could be your manager's"



I'm curious to know what types of content you all produce?

I think I can safely say that very few of you would be
interested in my subject matter. I create training
documents, policies and procedures, and operations
materials for a building services company. Sometimes I do
proposals and RFPs, but very little of what I produce has
anything whatsoever to do with computers or technology in
the traditional sense of the word. In fact, my content is
about as low tech as possible, though I suppose it would


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