[Framers] Nostalgia - was Re: FrameMaker 2015

[Frank Stearns]

On Thu, 2 Apr 2020, Craig Ede wrote:

> Nostalgia can cause trouble. I recently was in an interview with a

True, to some degree.

On the other hand, I've noted some annoying shifts in some language 
"pools" such that "process" becomes more important than "results". 
This seems to be especially true in academia.

I've been teaching some online classes in another technical subject 
area entirely (music technology -- recording, mixing, live sound as 
part of a music technology masters).

Recently, the university hired an external bunch of educrats to 
"review" material and make it "align" to new "standards", forcing 
dull, dull, dull language that only educrats can love (students hate 
it, as did I as a student when this kind of thing started to take hold 
40-50 years ago).

When asked to build and teach these classes a few years back, getting 
them online seemed like an impossibility. But I thought about it for a 
spell and came up with a few techniques, one of them being that EVERY 
word of the online content -- from instructions to readings -- would 
never, ever fall into that dull, passive, academic drone language.

Without getting artificially giddy or imprecise, all text would excite 
and engage. Seemed to work; my classes picked up some campus-wide 
awards and the overall program itself was in the top 10 of the entire 
online offerings in the USA.

Of course, following this review, I got into trouble -- but fought 
back and actually won. (And probably picked up some enemies among the 
educrats.)

> multinational Health Care company in the Milwaukee/Waukesha area and 
> referred to 'tagging' paragraphs in unstructured FrameMaker. The

I can't for the life of me see what's wrong with this.

> interviewer was nonplussed and corrected me, saying unstructured 
> FrameMaker was not like XML. Well, it isn't. But tagging was how the 
> process was described.

Absolutely.

> But I believe he saw that use of the 
> terminology as a slip in my understanding of the two faces of 
> FrameMaker, unstructured and structured, both of which had 
> importance for this particular job.

How were you supposed to describe this action?

> Didn't get that contract. Probable a multiplicity of factors, but 
> this tagging thing didn't help.

And you might have dodged a bullet, such as "non-doers" telling you 
how to "do." That gets reallllly annoying, especially when your 
methods/words work and regular folks/users see and appreciate this.

Frank Stearns
FSA