There is a mindset within the technical authoring community which equates technical documentation only with the production of printed hardcopy documentation or “manuals.” Among such people, the role of a technical author is simply to produce “manuals” and no matter what arguments you counter this with, all you will get in response is “manuals!” Needless to say such people invariably view anyone who knows anything about HTML as being a closet web developer, rather than a technical author.

The problem with this point of view is that we live in the second decade of the 21st Century, not the 1970s. We live in the age of the Internet. Just like engineering, technical publishing is an evolving specialism. One aspect of this has been the application of psychology to information development, and the implications that this has had on the content development and formatting of technical documents. Furthermore it is also now well established that people learn in different ways and therefore should have available to them a range of learning resources.