deep gray sea
sites and systems: WRQ Technical Notes
May 8, 2004 The library of WRQ technical notes includes several hundred documents authored by technical writers in the support group. The documents are delivered in HTML and Text format on the WRQ support web site. I created the layout and stylesheets used to deliver the first couple of generations of the technotes during 1998, followed by the WordFactory system to produce them. Here are just a few examples.
Fast Chevy
Pretty technical content, isn't it? Almost "rocket scientist" material (groan!). These are actually very early test technotes displaying the original (now largely forgotten) WRQ Guide Services brand. While working on the system, I'd create a new document every time I needed to validate some feature. The summer I did the layout, the test data themes seemed to center around goats, fish, Darwin Award candidates, and renderings of the classic camp song 99 Bottles of Beer. This is a very simple document with only a title, a short summary, an applicability section, and a small number of links to other test documents. View full size image...
Catalog Example
This is an example of a catalog. This is a kind of data-driven document that includes titles and short summary paragraphs from a number of related documents. The technical writers create index documents using some of the database features in WordFactory. Typically an index links to a number of documents, which then link back to the index in the Related Technical Notes section. With one or two static entry-point pages that list the indices, the entire collection becomes browsable as well as somewhat self-maintaining. Although the technical notes are searchable, sometimes browsing through related document summaries is the best way to find the answer you're really looking for, instead of the one the search engine thought you might want. View full size image...
Fish With Whiskers
This document includes an illustration. The WordFactory tool and technote layout allowed document authors to create documents with pictures, tables, multiple levels of bulleted and numbered lists, code fragments, in-line styles, headings, and probably some other stuff I've forgotten about. The technical notes library included some of the most structurally complex documents I've seen rendered by a machine. The complexity of the technotes was one of the things that drove us to create our own system; other existing document management systems supported rather narrow ranges of styles and formats, and the technical writers weren't happy with them. View full size image...
More Recent Example
This is an example of a more recent (Q2 2002) WRQ Technical Note. They've redesigned the site and it looks much cleaner now. The whole Guide Services map thing went away. What I like about this, the third or fourth generation of technical notes on the site, is that they can be regenerated into a new template using the existing data and source documents. Wonder how long they can keep them going using WordFactory? View full size image...
About WRQ
WRQ is a software development and consulting firm with offices in Seattle, Singapore and Holland.
Their best known product is the Reflection series of terminal emulators.