In a group discussion earlier this week with some others in the Intermountain STC chapter, we talked about task-oriented vs. feature-oriented documentation. One of the people there mentioned that he rewrote one help system to get it that way. “Developers do it all the time,” he said, meaning redoing something after they realize they didn’t do it right the first time.

I’ve seen that myself. One project for which I maintain documentation was originally built using Vignette, a content management system. However, it was discovered later that to accommodate localization, they would have to rewrite the system as a Java app. (I don’t know the details, but the concept of why a CMS can’t handle localization is beyond me.)

I found myself wanting to do that to one of my help systems specifically.

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I’m starting a new help project, and I decided to take the opportunity to try something a little bit different. The help is going to be context-sensitive, probably WebHelp. In previous CSH projects, I provided an image of the screen and placed numbers in places where I was going to describe the functionality. Below the screenshot were corresponding annotations.

I have usually kept the how-to content separate. In one project, a separate manual described procedures for the various roles in the system. In another, I included how-to information in a second section in the table of contents. This time, I’m going to do something in between.

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