Technical Documentation Standards: Which Is the Best for Your Organization?

Establishing robust technical documentation standards is fundamental for creating clear, consistent, and effective user resources, directly influencing user adoption and support costs. Without these standards, organizations risk inconsistent information, increased user frustration, and higher support overhead. What’s more, the specific technical documentation standards adopted will directly impact content quality and team productivity, ultimately contributing to a positive user experience.

Below, we’ll examine different types of documentation standards, including open and closed approaches, and outline key criteria such as historical context, functional capabilities, and scalability to guide organizations in making informed decisions.

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What Are Technical Documentation Standards?

Technical documentation standards are the established guidelines, rules, and best practices that dictate the creation of technical documentation. These guidelines outline the structure, formatting conventions, terminology usage, delivery methods, and overall presentation of the documentation to ensure consistency, clarity, and accuracy across all user-facing content, making it easier for users to find, understand, and utilize the information they need. Adhering to these standards is also a key element of good documentation practices.

By establishing these documentation standards, organizations implement quality control for their technical content, ensuring information is presented effectively. This implementation often facilitates the creation of structured content, which further enhances clarity and reusability. By adhering to well-defined standards, organizations can improve content quality, reduce support inquiries, enhance user satisfaction, and optimize resource utilization.

Creating a Technical Documentation Standard Framework

Establishing effective documentation standards for an organization requires a nuanced approach. This crucial process involves carefully considering several key factors that will shape your framework, including understanding your audience and content, choosing appropriate tools and guidelines that support good documentation practices, and planning for implementation and maintenance. Thoughtful consideration of these overarching factors will provide a solid foundation for documentation standards that meet your organization's specific needs.

When establishing your documentation standards framework, these three essential criteria must be addressed:

1: Open Standard or Closed Standard?

Each has its ups, downs, and in-the-middles, so we’ll compare and let you decide which path to pursue.

When evaluating documentation standards, a fundamental consideration is their accessibility and control. Standards can generally be categorized by their openness, ranging from freely available specifications to proprietary systems governed by specific entities. 

Understanding these distinctions is crucial in determining the best fit for your organization's needs and resources:

• Open Standards: These are publicly accessible documentation guidelines and specifications that anyone can use without paying licensing fees. They often function as common languages in the documentation world and would suit organizations that prioritize cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and interoperability across different tools and platforms.
• Closed Standards: These are proprietary documentation guidelines and specifications controlled by a specific vendor or organization, often requiring licensing fees and potentially having restrictions on their use. They would suit organizations that value dedicated support from a vendor, need specific features or functionalities offered by a proprietary system, or already heavily rely on a particular vendor's ecosystem.
• The “Messy Middle”: This refers to documentation practices and specifications that aren't strictly open or closed. They might involve using open formats within proprietary tools or loosely defined internal guidelines. This approach better suits organizations that need some level of flexibility while still leveraging familiar tools or those in a transition phase.

Selecting between open, closed, and the messy middle technical documentation standards requires a careful balancing of factors like cost, control, support, and flexibility. Ultimately, the goal should be to align the chosen standard with your organization's unique technical requirements, budget, and long-term objectives.

2: Capabilities

Understanding the inherent capabilities of various documentation standards — which come from the fundamental tools used to create technical documentation —  is essential for selecting the one that best aligns with your organization's technical requirements, content needs, and team workflows. 

The following outlines the key features and functionalities of six commonly used authoring standards for technical documentation:

• Markdown: This lightweight markup language was initially designed for simple web writing. Prized for its simplicity and readability, it allows for rapid creation of developer-focused and web-friendly documentation. 
• DocBook: An established, semantic markup language based in XML, DocBook has its roots in structured document creation. Its strength lies in providing a robust framework and enabling versatile output to many formats for complex technical content.
• Microsoft Word: This widely adopted proprietary word processor became a default tool for various writing tasks. While familiar and easy to start with, it has limitations for structured technical documentation and web output.
• Wiki: Wiki is an open-source, collaborative web platform, exemplified by Wikipedia that allows for easy, community-driven content creation. It's well-suited for knowledge bases and FAQs, though quality control can be a challenge for delivering large documentation sets.
• Docs-as-Code: Emerging from software development practices, this modern philosophy treats documentation like code, integrating with tools like Git. It offers benefits like enhanced collaboration, version control, and automation for technical teams.
• DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture): Created specifically for organizing technical documentation, DITA is an XML-based architecture emphasizing modularity with certain authoring tools. Its key benefit is enabling powerful content reuse and efficient management of extensive documentation libraries.

A thorough understanding of these diverse capabilities is crucial for evaluating which documentation standard can best support your team's content creation, management, and delivery needs.

3: Scalability

The ability of a documentation standard to effectively handle the growth and increasing complexity of your documentation over time is paramount. Scalability becomes critical as products evolve and their documentation needs to expand in volume and intricacy. Choosing a documentation standard with strong scalability features from the outset can save significant time, resources, and headaches as your documentation requirements mature.

Here’s what to consider in terms of scalability when choosing an authoring standard and which are best suited to each consideration:

• Content Reuse: The ability to use the same information in multiple places reduces redundancy and update efforts, becoming crucial as documentation grows for efficiency and consistency.
  
  • Best Suited Authoring Standards: DITA is designed with reusable topics and content references, and DocBook's semantic markup allows for identifying and reusing content. Docs-as-Code also provides modular files that can be linked and reused.
• Modularity: Breaking down documentation into smaller, manageable topics simplifies organization, updates, and maintenance of large content bodies, supporting scalability through independent work and easier updates.
  
  • Best-suited authoring standards: DITA's topic-based architecture is inherently modular, and DocBook is structured around sections and chapters. Docs-as-Code also benefits from each file representing a module.
• Conditional Content: Including or excluding information based on variables (like product versions) helps manage variations without duplication, essential for documentation scaling across multiple product lines or audiences.
  
  • Best-suited authoring standards: DITA has robust built-in support for conditional content using attributes and profiling.
• Version Control: Tracking changes and managing different versions is vital for accuracy and collaboration as documentation evolves; integration with systems like Git is key for scalability.
  
  • Best-suited authoring standards: Docs-as-Code strongly emphasizes and integrates directly with version control systems like Git, and plain text-based standards like Markdown and AsciiDoc also work well with Git.
• Automation: Automating output building, index generation, and consistency checks saves time and reduces errors as documentation volume and complexity increase.
  
  • Best-suited authoring standards: DITA has a well-established and comprehensive tooling ecosystem for automation, and Docs-as-Code, with its command-line focus, allows for significant automation. DocBook also has tools that support automation.
• Tooling: A mature ecosystem of authoring, managing, and publishing tools provides features essential for efficiently handling large-scale documentation projects, directly supporting scalability.
  
  • Best-suited authoring standards: DITA has a well-established and comprehensive tooling ecosystem, offering strong support for multi-channel publishing and document translation workflows. DocBook also has mature tooling, though it can be more specialized, whereas Docs-as-Code leverages a broader ecosystem of developer tools.

When selecting a documentation standard, carefully evaluate its ability to scale with your growing needs. This decision will significantly impact the long-term efficiency and manageability of your technical documentation.

Streamline Your Technical Documentation Standards with Heretto

Choosing the right technical documentation standards for your organization is a multifaceted decision, requiring careful consideration of factors like openness, capabilities, and scalability. Each standard—from the simplicity of Markdown to the robust structure of DITA—offers unique advantages and trade-offs.

Recognizing that no single "magical" standard exists to fit every need, Heretto provides a powerful and flexible CCMS designed to work seamlessly with a variety of documentation standards. Whether you're leveraging the lightweight nature of Markdown, the semantic richness of DocBook, or the modularity of DITA, Heretto's features empower your team to create, manage, and deliver high-quality documentation efficiently. With its robust content management system, workflow automation, multi-channel publishing, and support for structured content, Heretto helps to ensure the effective implementation and scaling of your chosen documentation standards. 

By providing a centralized platform, Heretto streamlines your documentation processes, enhances collaboration, and ultimately helps you deliver exceptional user experiences by supporting good documentation practices across your content lifecycle.

Ready to discover how Heretto can support your organization's technical documentation standards and optimize your content operations? Book a demo today to see Heretto in action and discuss your specific needs.