I started my current job five years ago this week. Reaching the level of senior technical writer brings me to ask whether I’ve got the smarts to go along with the time I’ve clocked.

A Narrow View of Tech Comm

When I graduated from Utah State University two months before starting as an intern, I thought technical communication consisted mainly of writing manuals, help systems, and the occasional tutorial. I thought the main activities were writing and creating images for print or Web.

My definition of a technical writer didn’t differ much from most people’s if at all.

I hadn’t heard the terms CSS, single sourcing, structured authoring, DITA, social media, Agile, RSS, SEO, or content strategy. Some of these things were either relatively new or not dreamed of at that point.

I belonged to the student chapter of the Society for Technical Communication, but the chapter members mainly learned from each other. There was only so far we could go that way.

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In one of my help projects, I put together styles for the topic titles and headings that visually divides the sections of the topics. Size and font weight aren’t the only things available for making headings stand out and the structure of a help topic understandable for the user. Here’s the styling I used, as well as another style that may help headings visually noticeable.

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One thing that puzzles CSS newbies and even intermediates (as it did and still does with me) is how to get the visual layout with CSS that can easily be achieved with tables. A two-column layout where the columns are equal lengths is one such layout. (This assumes columns that are different colors.) As part of this week’s CSS tips, I’ll share how I got mine on this very site.

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It feels like a good week to post about CSS and Web design techniques. Today’s suggestion comes from one of the interaction designers I used to work with. A couple of years ago, I was reworking some tutorials and putting them into HTML. Because our designers work in CSS, I decided I needed to learn it. This designer reviewed my CSS for me, and one of the tips he gave me was to declare attributes as high in the CSS file as possible.

One of the objects of CSS is to cut down on the code in HTML files, which increases the speed at which browsers load the pages. You can also reduce the size of your CSS file itself with this technique.

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My brilliant idea was going to be a couple of pages added to this site. The first is a page that highlights books that I own and recommend, along with some descriptions. (Gordon McLean has a bookshelf page that is largely images only.) I still plan on doing that, and the object of posting that intention here is to make it a commitment. You’ve heard it here, folks, so I can hardly be a flake about it now, can I?

The other idea I had was a CSS reference mostly for myself, but which others may find useful. However, there’s something better.

Peter Grainge, Adobe Community Expert on RoboHelp, mentioned in a RoboHelp forum post that there’s a little, free-of-charge CSS editor out there called TopStyle Lite. TopStyle Pro will cost you, but Lite is still a nice tool and provides selector and property options as you go along. It has a Style Inspector that basically does what I would have done.

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My job has involved opportunities for some Web design, which helps to satisfy the drive to create. We have a separate team for interaction designers, and they are very talented in using cascading style sheets (CSS) to design their prototypes. When the CSS emphasis was established in the group (the user education team and the interaction design team are what you could call “sister teams”), I took some time to learn what CSS is about and see if I could harness it in developing some HTML tutorials as well as my online help systems.

I really became excited about CSS, and here’s why.

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