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Here is some archeology from Tulsa!
Horton's book is "Designing and Writing Online Documentation",
copyright 1990. Because it was one of the first guides in this field, it is
considered canonical. (It may have been revised a number of times, but I am
not aware of the revisions.) Horton put considerable time into his research
and he drew heavily on existing research from other sources - but most of it
was from the mid-to-late 1980s. For instance, he advises avoiding all
uppercase, not because it is shouting, but for the standard Reading Ed
justification that all uppercase removes important visual cues to word
recognition and thus makes the reader work harder. Here is his advice on
bold:
"If you must emphasize key words in the body of text, highlight only
a few and use only subtle emphasis mechanisms such as underlining, boldface
type, and italics."
Canonical or not, we need to be careful of this guide for a number
of reasons:
1. Horton's focus is on putting documents (books, guides, internal
papers, etc.) online.
2. Horton's research comes from the mainframe/terminal world and
the infant Mac.
3. The computers/monitor combinations for which he wrote did not
have the display capability that today's computers do. Writing for them was
like writing DOCs in ASCII and displaying for the visually impaired.
4. Horton's book is not "Designing and Writing Help." It is
pre-windows, pre-WinHelp. There is only one chapter on hypertext - presented
as emerging technology.
5. We have learned a lot since 1990.
Cheers!
>Leonard Porello writes:
> >Thanks for the reference. I find it interesting that Horton advocates
> using
> >bold. In printed text and in E-mail, when I see bold I feel as if I am
> >being shouted at (all caps is worse, however). However, loving words as
> >I do, I tend to read closely.
> >
> >I do not mean to be a gadfly, and if you can not recall, I understand,
> >but on what evidence does Horton base his assertions?
>
>
