When I started as a technical writer, in the pre-PC days, most work was in what was called the engineering field. I mainly worked with aircraft manuals, but also with manuals relating to other engineering areas, such as buses, ships, and buildings. We produced hand-written manuscripts, which were typed, reviewed, typeset, laid out, reviewed, and finally printed.

Things are different now, because technology has allowed the technical writer to take over the parts of the process previously performed by typists, typesetters, layout artists, illustrators, photographers, platemakers and printers. Writers are also producing documents in non-printed formats. My belief is that we have evolved into two sub-species: page layout technical writers and hypertext technical writers. Writers who use layout tools such as FrameMaker rarely use hypertext tools such as RoboHelp. Writers who use Dreamweaver are unlikely to use Word.

With DITA separating content from form, I believe these two sub-species will merge back into one. Fresh blood, to continue the Darwinian theme, may be added by new writers entering directly into the DITA generation, without a previous history in the page layout or hypertext worlds.