What’s Up, EDoc?!
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Neil Perlin is an internationally recognized content consultant who helps clients create effective content across various mediums. The document discusses several predictions for the future of technical communication, including increased use of mobile-friendly responsive design, topic-based authoring, structured authoring using standardized styles, and analytics to track content usage. It also covers trends toward open web standards, cloud-based tools, and smaller chunks of reusable content.
What’s Up, EDoc?!
- 2. Who Am I? Neil Perlin - Hyper/Word Services. – Internationally recognized content consultant. – Help clients create effective, efficient, flexible content in anything from hard-copy to mobile. – STC’s lead W3C rep – ’02 – ‘05. – Certified – Flare, Mimic, RoboHelp, Viziapps Studio.
- 3. Some Specific Predictions – On the Broad Side
- 5. Mobile If the definition is always changing, what is “mobile”? Effectively “the un-desktop”. How to create content for all these things? – HTML5, responsive design, other technologies and methodologies.
- 6. HTML5 HTML 5 – More power than HTML 4.01, less rigid than XML. – Strategic effect – better enables web crawlers. – Mobile driver – basis for “hybrid” mobile apps. – Supports responsive design.
- 7. Responsive Design Device-agnosticism, or… “…use of media queries, fluid grids, and scalable images to create sites that display… well… at multiple resolutions.” – Implementing Responsive Design, Tim Kadlec New Riders, 2013 Emerging support in popular HATs. – Examples from RoboHelp 11 and Flare 10…
- 8. Responsive Design Note the design changes as the display size shrinks – RoboHelp.
- 9. Responsive Design And again here – Flare.
- 10. Content Strategy Can’t just wing it in this environment, Calls for a “content strategy.” Which is what? – Depends on your company, might involve doc cost-justification, strategic role for doc team, standards, content creation, tools, training, etc. Plus two new writing approaches – topic- based authoring and structured authoring.
- 11. Topic-Based Authoring Authoring content in chunks – “topics” – rather than documents or books. – A topic is as focused and self-contained as possible a discussion about one subject. Not new. – Dates back to ‘91 with first HATs. – Actually dates back to ‘65 and InfoMapping.
- 12. Structured Authoring Authoring with structure. – Just means content has structure – no precon- ceptions about what it is or how it’s applied. So what is “structure”? – Standard and consistent sectional, syntactical, and stylistic rules. – What technical communicators have always created, albeit usually manually…
- 13. What Do I Get Out of This? Pros: – Flexibility – Granular content easier to target. – Multi-author capable projects. – Content re-use. – Single author = writing consistency, ownership. – CMS integratability – Self-explanatory. Cons: – New way of authoring – lack of continuity. – Excess granularity can = too many topics.
- 14. Analytics Need some way to track usage, rather than just releasing our material into the void. We’ve had analytics for years but seldom used it. – 3rd party – Google Analytics. – Vendor-specific – RoboHelp Plus, MadCap Pulse. See April issue of Intercom for more.
- 15. The Cloud Short definition of “the cloud” » http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.f ree-power-point-templates.com%2Farticles%2Fbest-cloud-computing- powerpoint-templates
- 16. The Cloud What to expect: – Output to the cloud – changes distribution. »ViziApps Flare project. »Snapguide (www.snapguide.com). – Cloud-based tools – access on any device with a browser and internet connection – unhooks us from the office. »Google Drive, Office 365, ViziApps Studio.
- 17. Social Media Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest(!)… – like it or not, use them. If you don’t: – You’ll miss emerging uses in areas like tech support and customer support. – You can’t stop it – try and it’ll happen anyway and you’ll be left behind… – …and get a reputation for being out of touch.
- 18. Some Specific Predictions – On the Focused Side
- 19. DOCTYPE Declaration In Flare. – Adds a DOCTYPE statement to topic files to render in “strict” or “standards” mode. – No DOCTYPE – topics render in “quirks” mode.
- 20. DOCTYPE Declaration Strategic decision… – “Strict” tells browser to use new, strict rules for displaying HTML files. – “Quirks” tells browser to use older, loose rules. – How to decide? » Do your topics use display features like floats that don’t display correctly in normal mode? Use strict mode – e.g. enable DOCTYPE. » Not having these problems? Use quirks mode – e.g. ignore DOCTYPE – maybe...
- 21. DOCTYPE Declaration What’s the effect? – “Quirks” lets modern browsers violate current syntax rules to run older HTML files correctly but may cause trouble going forward. – “Strict” enforces modern syntax rules. » Which may break the display of older HTML files. – Effects vary depending on browser, version. – Talk to your programmers. – See http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/.
- 22. Relative Units of Measure We’re used to point-based sizes – 72pt = 1” – from print – familiar and simple.
- 23. Problems With Points Points being fixed, are fine in print but have two problems in online outputs: – Can’t be resized by a browser user. »Selecting View > Text Size in IE has no effect. – Can’t be resized automatically by a browser.
- 24. Relative Size Units – % – Based on default size of normal on a given browser – 100%. »H1 of 150% is 50% larger than normal for any browser. – em – Based on currently-used font size. »If body is set to 16px, then 1.5 em = 24px. – rem (root em) – Based on font size for html{} tag. Not yet widely supported, esp. in HATs. – ex – Poorly supported – don’t use.
- 25. Why Relative Sizes? Image at absolute width in a too-narrow space. – Note horizontal scroll bar. At relative width in same space. – No horizontal scroll bar; 50% width makes browser show the image at 50% of available space – e.g. “relative”. – Each browser handles the formatting for you.
- 26. Float A CSS property that controls the positioning of other elements in an HTML page. Replaces (or eventually will replace) use of tables as layout design elements.
- 27. Augmented Reality Keeps “real” reality and adds info to it. – Most commonly by augmenting a smartphone screen showing what’s in front of you. »Versus the new reality of “virtual reality”. – The augment can be related to what’s displayed or just overlaid. – For example…
- 28. Augmented Reality Examples Fun but silly example, with the AR unrelated to the display – Wikitude’s Swat the Fly. Starbuck’s Cup Magic from Valentine’s Day, 2012.
- 29. Augmented Reality Examples Using the accelerometers to determine phone’s orientation and direction and NASA terrain data to determine and label the skyline from any point in any direction – Phil Endecott’s Panoramascope: Augmented Reality.
- 30. Wearables Eliminate the annoyance of having to haul your iPhone out of your pocket. Sounds silly, but consider convenience and new possibilities.
- 31. Wearables Google Glass is the best known example. But there’s also: – Other glasses. – NFC ring. – Samsung Galaxy Gear watch.
- 32. And On the Far Out End… “Internet of things” – linked sensors and actuators in physical objects. Dynamically reconfigurable output. – See Author-it DAP (Dynamic Assistance Platform). Dynamically modeled OLH – Metadata- wrapped, self-assembling content chunks.
- 34. Technical Move from… – Proprietary to open code formats, like RTF to XHTML, HTML5. – Proprietary, local to open, web outputs, like HTML Help to WebHelp, HTML5. – PC to web, multi-access environments, like the cloud. – Documents to repurposable content chunks. – Simple to complex technical ecosystems, like CSS3 and media queries.
- 35. Management of Content We should see: – Need for more rigorous topic-based content created using templates, CSS, etc. – Less text. – Need for strategic and cost-justification. – Need for standards to future-proof our material to avoid this.
- 36. How to Deal With All This
- 37. Some Crucial Questions Which technologies will take off? Which will your company use? You? Who knows? – Remember Blackbird, the CueCat, server push, mCommerce? So what do we do? Be independent – act on our own rather than waiting for your company to act for you.
- 38. What To Do Stay current technically. Stay current on general business and trends. – To understand events – profitability vs. market share and re-birth of RoboHelp, Apple vs. Adobe re Flash, Adobe’s HTML5 conundrum. – Business issues can kill a technology. Stay current on your company’s business. – Show tech comm’s support of corp. strategy.
- 39. What To Do Develop, promulgate, and enforce standards to “future-proof” your work. – Such as relative sizes in CSSs. Develop and maintain metrics. – For cost-justification a CFO will accept. Get trained on your tools and technologies. – A course does the flailing for you.
- 40. What To Do Review your tools re environmental change. – Like FrameMaker in an age of “topics”. Accept rise of “content”, social media. Don’t denigrate tools in favor of writing. – Tools enable content delivery, without which content is pointless. Embrace and help shape change…
- 41. Hyper/Word Services Offers… Training • Consulting • Development Flare • Flare CSS • Flare Single Sourcing RoboHelp • RoboHelp CSS • RoboHelp HTML5 ViziApps Single sourcing • Structured authoring