Niklas Pivic’s Reviews > Every Page Is Page One > Status Update

Bob Lee from Symantec said they had done a study of those customers who said they preferred PDF, when they offered them both PDF and HTML-based topic-based assistance online they found that even the people who said they preferred PDF all actually selected the topics and the HTML output at a ratio of 26 to 1.

It's fun to read about potential reasons for keeping documentation internal...

"Competitors will steal our ideas

This one has always mystified me a little, but I have heard it from several sources. Some companies fear that if they put their documentation on the Web, their competitors will copy their products."

Well...maybe not applicable; if people search Google to find answers, will they really find *your* stuff?

"In test-driven development, you don’t start by coding a routine and then figure out how to test it; you write the test first and then write code that passes that test. Writing the test first is an excellent way to make sure you really understand what the code is supposed to do. This has been shown to produce higher quality software with fewer bugs."

"If you have had any experience with structured writing or have read a book about it, you may have come away with the impression that it is one specific set of rules, one specific tool, one specific standard, or one specific XML schema such as DocBook or DITA. Nothing could be further from the truth. Structured writing is a wide and diverse field encompassing many methods, practices, tools, and technologies."