RE: The Burden of Screen Captures

["Mike O." <obie1121 -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

> darn...I must have missed that announcement. Was it in the
> "newsletter?"
Prominently featured in many newsletters and on this list... 

Actually it was in the MS Manual of Style. Not that I am/was a
slave to MS style guides, but in 1995 if your were working with
Windows development that was the logical place to start. (I
don't even know what the current MS guides have to say on the
subject).

While developing Win95, MS also did some research on the
usefulness of user documentation, and they came up with some
guidelines on how to write procedures. Mostly it was just a
common-sense restatement of principles other tech writers were
already practicing. MS didn't invent task-oriented docs, but
they did inject it into the mainstream with the launch of Win95.
And we were all doing it. If you wrote short procedures that
popped up in WinHelp secondary windows, you were doing it too. 

At the time though, some also said it was a cynical attempt by
MS to justify delivering less documentation (remember the phrase
"discoverable documentation?")

In my experience, I'd say that the task-oriented principles
outlined by the MS style guide really did enter the mainstream
during the 1990s, and now most tech writers practice them to
some extent whether they are aware of them or not. 

I definitely remember interviewers grilling me about whether I
used a task-oriented approach. They were trying to weed out the
people who used the menu-driven approach.



--- John Posada <JPosada -at- book -dot- com> wrote:
> >>menus and dialog boxes? My impression is that this technique
> is
> >>was generally replaced by the task-oriented procedural
> approach
> >>sometime in the mid-1990s. I don't know your app, so I could
> be
> 
> 
> darn...I must have missed that announcement. Was it in the
> "newsletter?"
> 
> John Posada
> Senior Technical Writer
> Barnes&Noble.com
> jposada -at- book -dot- com
> 212-414-6656
>  "Available for next gig Feb 01, 2003"
> 


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