In With the New: Video
“Everything is on YouTube.”
So stated my son the other day, in response to a comment about looking to see if something might be there. I’d have to agree with him. Every time I look for something there, I’m surprised. The fact that younger kids think of YouTube as a primary source of information also gives pause.
For a while, I’ve been looking at videos on YouTube and other sites with tech writing in mind. What jumps out is that people use videos in varied, unexpected ways (to me, at least). It’s not just that people are creating videos and putting them up there. They’re also taking news broadcasts and movies and making them their own. For movies, I’ve seen videos where people have taken their favorite scenes, put them together, and added music. While some are similar, you can see that each person gives theirs a slightly different slant or uses different music. What’s important to one person is not so much to another.
Now think of that related to tech writing. You’ve researched a topic, talked to SMEs, and written something up. Still, it’s your slant on what’s most important. You’ve been trained what to look for, how to organize content, and how to prepare the info. With this usage in YouTube in mind, someone could just take what you’ve written and make their own version. Assume that users will (a) make their own videos, and (b) take something already made and create a new version. In may be from something in-house. Perhaps it may be from an external source. This has tremendous potential. Combined with comments, it could provide a wealth of information.
By now, I imagine (I hope) that companies are either using or already in the process of setting up an internal video site along the lines of YouTube. For documentation departments, I believe now is the time to try and move that along. The process may take a while to run through a company. There could be a number of issues to work out: technology requirements, security, processes, and usage guidelines are possibly a few.
We’re always the voice for the users while an app is in development. I believe that we now must be the voice for the users coming in that will expect to be able to post and review job-related videos.
I believe that the role of tech writers will change. We may shift more into content management and development of enterprise information and moderator of user-generated content. There will still be procedures to write and doc sets to create. We’ll just need to make room for whatever comes so the voice of the user is heard. All can participate. I’m looking forward to it.
XML – XSL Programming Features
In case you’re pondering whether or not to shift your docs to XML, here is another reason to do so.
One great feature of XML is the ability to incorporate some programming functionality into your docs. For instance, you can set up your XSL file to include some if..then and loop processing. You can set up attributes in such a way as to facilitate this processing.
One example is an attribute for, say, a “vegetable” element. The XSL file could contain a choose and when instruction to review the attribute, and if the attribute is “potato,” then display a specific picture of a potato.
For loop processing, you can use the for-each instruction. This is particularly useful for tables. Instead of building a table in HTML with content hard-coded in each row, you can build an empty table in your XSL file along with for-each instructions to populate it with content from your XML file. For example, let’s go back to the vegetable content. Imagine that you have two vegetables: potato and lettuce. For each of those, you have two types. For potato, it could be russet and red; for lettuce, it could be romaine and iceberg.
When you use for-each, you can essentially say (in this case): take the first vegetable and its two types (the nested elements), and put it all in one table row. Then go back and select the next vegetable and types, and put it in the next row. This continues until all the elements (potato, lettuce, etc.) have been transferred to the HTML table. If content changes are needed afterward, you can just update the XML. The HTML is part of the XSL file, so wouldn’t be changed.
In any case, more options are available to set up your docs with more flexibility and processing features when you use XML.