Re: Book on Modern Technical Writing

[Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com>]

A lot of my users grew up with the web, as did most of the UX
designers I've worked with in recent years.

Modern UIs are typically generated in a web browser from JavaScript
calls to multiple REST APIs. Typically it's a bunch of task-specific
pages. Different pages often use different libraries to use different
things with the same data. Often some pages are user-configurable.
Commonly there are API references users can use to extend the UI or
bypass it.

I don't see how that's "one complex UI." That seems like a straw man.

On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 10:57 AM,  <mbaker -at- analecta -dot- com> wrote:
> Depends on what you understand monolithic to mean. Yes, all software is a
> mashup. I use monolithic to mean that that mashup has been tightly coupled
> and integrated in one complex UI. There are many people who not only prefer
> to do their entire job in one window, but insist that it is the hallmark of
> a mature tool. Basically, they don't think any authoring tool is mature
> unless it looks and feels like Microsoft Word.
>
> To me, that is desktop thinking. But we are dealing with a generation that
> grew up on the desktop.
>
> In many ways the post-desktop world does look very similar to the
> pre-desktop world, which does make it easy to dismiss it as a throwback
> rather than as progress. But the desktop world was really shaped by the fact
> that small cheap computers proliferated before cheap connectivity was
> available. It forced computing from its natural environment on the network
> onto the strange small world of the desktop.
>
> The Web has liberated us from that strange small world, but that strange
> small world has been home for so long that we still have trouble thinking
> outside its confines or working outside its modes.
>
> This is perhaps part and parcel of why we still have a hard time thinking in
> terms of hypertext. The book is the paper equivalent of the desktop
> computer.
>
> Mark
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: techwr-l-bounces+mbaker=analecta -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> [mailto:techwr-l-bounces+mbaker=analecta -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On Behalf
> Of Robert Lauriston
> Sent: Friday, July 29, 2016 1:46 PM
> To: TECHWR-L Writing <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
> Subject: Re: Book on Modern Technical Writing
>
> Modern applications are not monolithic. They're mashups of various
> open-source components with some proprietary magic sauce worth paying for
> running on clusters of commodity VMs run by Amazon or Google.
>
> In one sense, the complexity continues to increase. In another sense, things
> become simpler, because the interoperation of the open-source building
> blocks can increasingly be taken as a given and managed at an ever higher
> level. Instead of configuring a UNIX server from scratch you can just spawn
> a VM with the stack you need from an online library of images, or spawn a
> whole cluster into a Docker Datacenter.
>
> On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 10:19 AM,  <mbaker -at- analecta -dot- com> wrote:
>> Yes, there are those who see the modern and the futuristic as
>> consisting of ever more complex monolithic systems. And there are
>> those who see the modern and the futuristic as consisting of small pieces
> loosely joined. ...
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