In a talk at the TCANZ conference in New Zealand in September, Rob Houser explained that Microsoft's approach to user assistance separated UA into "primary" and "secondary". Primary UA is information users don't need to ask for. Secondary UA requires the user to interact before the information will appear. So screen titles, labels, wizard tasks, and other UX devices that help the user understand how to use the application form primary UA.
Is Help sufficiently different from other forms of documentation that it should warrant a specialised DITA? Specialisation tends to be vertical (industry-specific) rather than horizontal (domain-specific). Single-sourcing makes a lot of sense if the Help is viewed as one possible output. A Help specialisation might make single-sourcing of manuals, Web and Help content difficult, although it might make the production of a suite of Help systems easier.
The Boston DITA Users Group will meet Tuesday, February 12, at 6:30PM.
Speaker: Eliot Kimber
Senior Solutions ArchitectTopic: Specialization in Real Time Tutorial.
Eliot will create a topic specialization. Come prepared with suggestions for unique elements.
January 15, 2008 – Bedford, NH – DocZone.com (www.doczone.com) today announced that BTI Systems, a leading provider of Optical Edge networking solutions for the delivery of gigabit services, has purchased a multi-year Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) contract to use the DocZone system for authoring, managing, and publishing DITA-based product content.
On a mailing list, I once read a comment to the effect that DITA was not suitable for Help, as it didn't provide support for popups. This comment rang a bell with me. When Microsoft released HTML Help (in 1995, I think), one of the first criticisms was that it didn't support rich text popups like good old WinHelp did. True, it did not, and its support for plain text popups was ungainly. Over time, the popup problem was solved by DHTML.
