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The library of WRQ technical notes includes several hundred documents
authored by technical writers in the support group. The documents are
delivered in HTML and Text format on the WRQ support web site. I
created the layout and stylesheets used to deliver the first couple of
generations of the technotes, along with the WordFactory
system to produce them. Here are just a few examples.
Click on an image below to see a full-size version in a new window.
Pretty technical content, isn't it? Almost "rocket scientist" material
(groan!). These are actually very early test technotes displaying the original
(now forgotten) WRQ Guide Services brand. While working on the system, I'd create
a new document every time I needed to validate some feature. The summer I did the
layout, the test data themes seemed to center around goats, fish, Darwin Award candidates,
and renderings of the classic camp song 99 Bottles of Beer. This is a very
simple document with only a title, a short summary, an applicability section, and a
small number of links to other test documents.
This is an example of a catalog. This is a kind of data-driven document that
includes titles and short summary paragraphs from a number of related documents.
The technical writers create index documents using some of the database features in
WordFactory. Typically an index links to a number of documents, which then link
back to the index in the Related Technical Notes section. With one or two
static entry-point pages that list the indices, the entire collection becomes
browsable as well as somewhat self-maintaining. Although the technical notes are
searchable, sometimes browsing through related document summaries is the best way to
find the answer you're really looking for, instead of the one the search engine
thought you might want.
This document includes an illustration. The WordFactory tool and technote layout
allowed document authors to create documents with pictures, tables, multiple levels of
bulleted and numbered lists, code fragments, in-line styles, headings, and probably some
other stuff I've forgotten about. The technical notes library included some of the
most structurally complex documents I've seen rendered by a machine. The complexity
of the technotes was one of the things that drove us to create our own system; other
existing document management systems supported rather narrow ranges of styles and formats,
and the technical writers weren't happy with them.
This is an example of a current (Q2 2002) WRQ Technical Note. This link takes
you directly to the document on the WRQ web site. Note that the whole Guide
Services map thing went away, and the entire site looks much cleaner. What I like
about this, the third or fourth generation of technical notes on the site, is that
they can be regenerated into a new template using the existing data and source documents.
Wonder how long they can keep them going using WordFactory?
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WRQ is a software development and consulting firm with offices in Seattle, Singapore
and Holland. Their best known product is the Reflection series of terminal emulators.
So how come those web pages had all those font tags and stuff in them?
Ooh, I knew somebody would ask about that. When I did the layout, the standard
browsers we needed to support at WRQ were IE 3 and Netscape 3. Yuck.
Neither of them were all that hot with stylesheets; the older version of IE we
nicknamed "Internet Exploder" after testing a couple of style-based
layouts.
If I were doing something like this again, I'd make it style-based and be confident
it would work in modern browsers. That would really simplify migrating from
one template to another. The migration process wasn't really all that hard
anyway; the content just gets poured into a template that supports navigation and
the corporate brand; when the site design changes, the template gets updated and
the documents regenerated.
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