Hyperviews Online

Find information on many aspects of email and email clients at http://mailformat.dan.info/ Topics include Headers, Body, Trailers, Quoting, Attachments, and Configuration of clients.

Max Kiesler has assembled comprehensive information on accessible AJAX applications: “How to Make Your AJAX Applications Accessible - 40 Tutorials and Articles.” Karen Mardahl provided this information.

On July 30, Online SIG Content Management lead Scot Abel published an article, “10 DITA Lessons Learned From Tech Writers in the Trenches,” based on interviews with technical writers at more than 20 software companies who are using DITA to create documentation at this time. Members report finding the article meets Scot’s promise of “useful advice, practical tips, honest warnings, and lessons learned… straight forward and useful information.”

In July, 2006 a discussion arose on an STC list about whether or not to include a Go button with a dropdown list. In response Whitney Quesenbery pointed out an article originally published in the January, 200s issue of Usability Interface, newsletter of the STC Usability and User Experience community: “Should a Go button be included with a drop down list?” by Vannesa Mosher and Steven Weintraub. The article summarizes a list discussion of the same topic.

The Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines are posted, and include text and tone, and guidelines on writing software messages.

Sun Microsystems has made its GNOME Documentation Style Guide available online, including chapters on basics of information design and writing for international audience

Open Source Software (OSS) refers to any application for which the source code is distributed. A definition is available online.

Many organisations work with both Open Source Software and proprietary commerical software. Open source content management sytems have the advantage of supporting open standards and thus being easier to integrate with other open source and with proprietary systems. The international association for Open Source Content Management has more information.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has “validation pages,” where developers can enter a path, file name, or free text for HTML or CSS to be checked for conformance to the standard. If the code passes validation, the site can display the W3C logo.

Adobe has FAQs that address use Adobe products for technical communication.

Scoop is a content management application used by journalists to produce major newspapers and magazines. The main editing tool is Scoop Edit for print or Scoop Headline for web. All edited material is stored in a central database, on a file server, a SQL server, or both. Scoop eLibrary provides archival searching for old articles. This system is described fully in an article on the Swedish producer’s site.

Scoop is also the name of a blogging application used by many popular sites. This application allows site users to make posts and comments, and has special ranking features to support discussion by a community. Thus topics stay on the main page because they are important to users of the site. There are also categories, created by site administrators, which allow for retrieving posts by topic, and navigational lists of posts made recently or by frequent posters.

W3C Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 was published on June 27 as a candidate recommendation.

Adobe JamJar is an interactive, attractive, and scalable internet application based on Flex 2 technologies. JamJar provides a private, persistent work area for small groups to easily exchange digital content in order to plan events, exchange ideas, manage projects, centralize information, and share files including images.

A service called Grokker is available as a demo to search Yahoo, Wikipedia, and Amazon. Although the demo does not search everything on the Web, it’s a useful tool in research, helping to aggregate results that are meaningful to the searcher.

The entire on-line FrameMaker Help is now (June, 2006) available as a downloadable PDF.

Online SIG annual conference team members Saurabh Kudesia, Kathy Ramsey, and Wanda L. Worley share links they learned of at the Annual Conference. (more…)