back in the day

Charlie Brooker doesn't get it. You see his story sounds much like mine, being a part of the burgeoning wave of the Internet’s Geekdom-as-cool that rose from the mid/late-90s through the bubble bursting. But now Mr Brooker seems to feel disconnected from the latest Internet Thing.

Here's what happened: The Internet, as communication medium, is fully part of the fabric of society. The Internet isn't getting there, it isn't new and hip, it is now an institution. A popular site like myspace is now a mass-culture phenomenon. And like everything before it, the younger generations' trends are what's hip.

It's the same thing as his disdain for the term blogsphere. We can safely say that blogs were the domain of the geeky a few years back, but now anyone who wants a voice can participate. The price of admission was knowing the technology. But as the general level of technological aptitude is so much higher than it was 10 years ago, anyone can join in the fun. Thus the blogsphere isn't the geek's domain.

I think it's hard for those who feel they contributed to the rise of the web to be less visible online; the pioneers' strong voices have been drowned out. You used to visit websites and most of them were created by people similar to you, geeky types. But now, with everyone able to publish online, it's like you're walking down a crowded city street.

correction

I'm sure it has happened to you - you've written and released chapters and pages and volumes, and realized that you got it wrong. I don't mean the actual explanations on a page, but let's say - the organization of your document. (I don't think it's just me)

Because we're not the SMEs, or the users, or we're not the experienced user, there's definitely a learning process the TW goes through when absorbing and spitting out information. When you're documenting some really REALLY big system or process, I think it takes a while, hundreds of hours perhaps, to distill all the information you're tasked to document. The only times where I think this isn't the case are when you either aren't documenting an ultra-complex topic, or if you have a brilliant teacher - and come on, most engineers aren't brilliant teachers.

So I pose this question to you, my loyal readers (technorati says my audience is the #1051076th popular blog, so that's a lot of you):

When realizing your information could be better organized, do you change the organization in your documents? Do you think that this will confused your readers or catch them off guard?

I personally have no qualms about changing things around. Computer hardware/software users are used to constant updates of their software, and chasing the new [technologies], so changing documentation (not contradicting yourself) simply follows the paradigm.

Obviously you don't want to make constant, radical changes. And I'll add the caveat that your text should be highly searchable or contain a usable index, so when the user's expectations fail, they can fall back on a solid means of finding what they need. And obviously, major reorganizations should be minimized. If you constantly find yourself doing this, something is wrong.

javascript be gone

Here's my latest gripe based on 3 experiences. It's highly annoying when developers create feature-rich web-based email clients that try to mock MS outlook.

Why does this bother me?

Because in an attempt to create all the UI niceties, the applications are encumbered by A LOT of client-side javascript. Now that's all well and good, but these applications bring my older-than-6-months PCs to a grinding halt!! This is javascript abuse! Granted my computers at home are each about 5 years old (a 1.2 GHz Athlon-based PC, and a 466 MHz G4 mac).

The three examples:

• company's intranet CMS system
• Yahoo! Mail beta
• Windows Live Mail beta (hotmail++ if you will)

These applications are beautiful and provide a great user experience with plenty of immediate and well-thought out visual feedback, but they bring my two home systems to a grinding halt. I'd probably see a performance gain if these email clients were deployed as Java applications.

So I'll leave the web-developers with this: don't abuse javascript, keep in mind that not everyone has a PC built in the past 2 years.

searching...

I have another gripe about desktop applications. Ok, maybe not a gripe, but a feature that would really make me happy:

In Adobe Acrobat especially, I wish you could search for term XXXX, that appears around term YYYY.

What I'm really asking for is that programs such as Acrobat (or Word, or whatever), have some kind of smart indexing. It seems to me that you could wrangle some sort of identifier of vicinity of two search terms. If the two terms you are searching for have a very close vicinity, you score a hit. I wonder if Google has any level of searching that works in that way.

OK
OJ
Oak
Oik
KO
Edit...
Ignore all
Add to dictionary

documenting the biggest and baddest toys

The owners manual for the new 2007 Mercedes Benz S-class is 700 pages long, according to the NYT . All reality aside, you've got to admit that would be serious fun to write.
Imagine, having the engineer at your call explaining the 5000 point seat adjustments to you, and you have to write the docs in such a way to make the buyer feel like they got the $100k worth.

No sarcasm here. That would be fun as hell.