Re: About mil/heavy industries documentation standards (long)

Subject: Re: About mil/heavy industries documentation standards (long)
From: Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net>
To: eric -dot- dunn -at- ca -dot- transport -dot- bombardier -dot- com
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 13:04:18 -0500



eric -dot- dunn -at- ca -dot- transport -dot- bombardier -dot- com wrote:

"Gilger.John" <JGilger -at- acresgaming -dot- com> wrote on 02/12/2004 12:28:39 PM:

SGML was invented to take care of some of the presentation issues.


Have to take issue with that statement. SGML takes care of the information structure for gathering and storage. Not the presentation.
EDDs, FOSIs, and the like take care of presentation.



That's all well and good, but I think you are missing the point of the OP's question.

The issue isn't the technology of presenting information in a readable manner--there would be no reason for a standards body to specify what publishing software you should use, for example, or what markup language or format specification format should be implemented.

The issue is that it should be possible in a standard _about documentation_ to address, in general terms, the issue of presentation. They should be able to set a _standard_, in other words, that takes into account the possibility that different output modalities may not be able to render all elements of the standard.

For example, a standard could include recommendations for printed, Web browser, and character-terminal/PDA renderings separately and still point users toward guidelines for the best available use of those media.

As with all standards, it would be inappropriate to specify the details of the design (picking fonts and defining layouts, for example). But it wouldn't be too much to suggest that using all caps reduces readability rather than drawing attention to important information and maybe oughtn't to be used for warnings. Ya think? Or to say _something_ about line length/character count/leading as it affects readability.

If the information under discussion is critical life-and-death stuff, then it is certainly worthwhile to do something to help ensure that end users can actually absorb it on first reading.

Dick

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