Designing Information for the 21st Century  

In the past, documentation meant printed books. Then along came online help. Online books soon followed. Now we have the Internet and web pages. Developing a documentation plan today means more than planning how books are going to be structured, reviewed, and printed. It needs to take into account the possibilities that these new media have to offer. Achieve the most effective results by making delivery in these media part of your documentation planning.

Radecki, Steven Lewis. STC Proceedings (1997). Articles>Publishing>Online

Developing Online Help for OS/2 Applications  

One of the biggest problems facing Help developers is that of providing users with adequate methods of navigation through what can be huge amounts of information. After more than a two or three jumps, users can find themselves in topics that might be useful, but with no clear indication of how they got there or how to return to where they started. OS/2 gives the Help developer extraordinarily flexible tools for creating online documentation that can prevent this situation and provide users with a clearer path through online information than many other platforms can provide. However, this enhanced usability is not without its cost.

Radecki, Steven Lewis. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Documentation>Online>Help

HTML: Making the Move  

HTML is perhaps the most discussed topic in technical communications since the invention of the word processor. Interest in the Internet and the World Wide Web has exploded beyond anyone’s expectations (and perhaps their imagination as well). Microsoft has announced that they are moving away from Rich Text Format (Rw) as the source format for their Windowsbased online help systems, and Netscape is in the process of developing a cross-platform online help API that is also based on HTML. The question seems no longer to be whether or not to make the move to HTML, but when to make the move.

Radecki, Steven Lewis. STC Proceedings (1997). Articles>Web Design>HTML

Practical Hypermedia: Using Hypertext and Multimedia in the Real World  

Multimedia and hypertext are two of the hottest topics in technical communications today. Multimedia, in one form or another, has been around for decades—so has hypertext. Both have been of enormous interest to the technical communicator specifically, and the computer user in general. Lately, we have seen advancements in computer technology that can allow a computer user to produce presentations of considerable quality. Just as the advent of the Macintosh ushered in the era of desktop publishing, the rapidly falling prices of digital video cards and image editing software are about to pave the way for another revolution in desktop computing.

Radecki, Steven Lewis. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Multimedia>Hypertext