Do you remember what the world was like before word processing? In that dark recess of the stone age, documents were written with typewriters. Administrative assistants still took dictation. If you wanted a simple document or a report to look professional, you took a trip to the local typesetting shop. If you wanted to actually publish something, you talked to a printing and publishing company.

What a revolution, then, when tools such as Microsoft Word and Adobe FrameMaker came on the scene in the mid-1980s. Suddenly, it became possible to produce your own documents—and to make them look good. As WYSIWYG interfaces evolved, you could see exactly how your document would appear in print. You could change its format to your liking with a simple point and click. It's no wonder that these tools have since become the favorite of authors everywhere and a fixture in the industry.

Instantaneous communication is now expected

But the world has changed since the early 1980s. Our needs are being driven by different forces now. Professional-looking, printed documents still have their place, but they're no longer the primary way people communicate. We now live in an online world dominated by e-mail, Web sites, wikis and blogs. This online world is being inhabited by users with increasingly less patience for printed documents. With expectations driven by Google and the Web, we expect to find instantly available, relevant and up-to-date information—through devices we can carry in our pockets and hold in our hands.

As easy and familiar as they are, today's WYSIWYG authoring tools were not designed to support this new world. Helping you control the way a document will look in print doesn't count for much if your primary publishing channels are dynamic Web sites and feeds to handheld devices. Plus, if the real need for your readers is to get right to the topic they need, writing large print documents would seem to be missing the point.

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