STC Phoenix Chapter Website

What’s Up, EDoc! – Trends in Tech Comm

The once stable, almost staid world of technical writing has turned turbulent. In less than a decade, we’ve seen:

• The rise of topic-based authoring
• The rise of structured authoring in general and DITA in particular
• Increasingly complex technical ecosystems that ask us to decide about the Mark of the Web and quirks vs. strict browser modes
• The growth of mobile devices, and the need for single-source output that works on mobiles, PCs, and laptops
• The growth of social media and the need to integrate social media content with traditional documentation
• The spread of metadata and the promise of dynamically-modeled online help, CMSs, and more…

What exactly can we expect, and how do we deal with all this?