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History of Documentation and Publishing Tools

Run the History of Documentation and Publishing Tools MicroSim Fullscreen

About This MicroSim

This interactive timeline traces the lineage of tools used to write and publish books and technical documentation, from the first computerized document formatters in the 1960s through to Zensical, the Rust-based generator this book itself is testing (see Why Zensical?).

The timeline groups 17 milestones into five color-coded threads:

  • Early Publishing Tools — RUNOFF, troff, and TeX: the formatters that first turned plain text into typeset pages.
  • Markup Languages — GML, SGML, HTML, XML, and DocBook: the structural markup that separated a document's content from its presentation, enabling single-source publishing.
  • Markdown Ecosystem — Markdown's creation, the proliferation of incompatible converters, the decade-long gap before its syntax was formally re-specified, and the CommonMark standard that closed that gap.
  • Modern Doc-Site Generators — MkDocs and Material for MkDocs, the Python-based stack this book was originally built on.
  • Rust & Zensical — Rust's rise as a systems language, MkDocs going unmaintained, and the announcement of Zensical as its Rust-based successor.

How to Use

  1. Use the filter buttons to isolate one thread of the story, or view All Events together.
  2. Click any event box on the timeline to read its full description and historical context in the panel below.
  3. Use the Pan and Zoom buttons to move through time — scroll wheel zoom is disabled inside the timeline so it doesn't fight the page's own scrolling.
  4. Click Fit All at any time to reset the view to the current filter's full date range.

Iframe Embed Code

You can add this MicroSim to any web page by adding this to your HTML:

<iframe src="https://dmccreary.github.io/zensical-test/sims/publishing-tools-timeline/main.html"
        height="882px"
        width="100%"
        scrolling="no"></iframe>

Lesson Plan

Grade Level

College / professional development (technical writing, software engineering, or documentation-tooling audiences)

Duration

15-20 minutes

Prerequisites

Basic familiarity with what a "markup language" is (e.g. having seen HTML tags) is helpful but not required.

Activities

  1. Exploration (5 min): Filter to "Markup Languages" and click through GML, SGML, HTML, XML, and DocBook in order. Ask: what problem did each new format solve that the previous one didn't?
  2. Guided Practice (5-10 min): Filter to "Markdown Ecosystem." Discuss why a format with no formal specification for a decade caused real problems for tool builders, and how CommonMark fixed that.
  3. Assessment (5 min): Filter to "Rust & Zensical." Have learners explain in their own words why MkDocs going unmaintained, combined with a breaking 2.0 proposal, motivated a full rewrite instead of a patch.

Assessment

Learners should be able to explain, for at least two adjacent events on the timeline, what specific limitation of the earlier tool the later tool was built to solve.

References

  1. Zensical — the Rust-based successor to MkDocs discussed in this book's Why Zensical? page.
  2. MkDocs — the original Python documentation-site generator.
  3. Material for MkDocs — the theme this book is built with.
  4. CommonMark — the standardized Markdown specification.
  5. John Gruber's original Markdown syntax description (2004).
  6. The Rust Programming Language — official site, including its history.
  7. DocBook — an early single-source XML/SGML publishing format.
  8. Pandoc — the "universal document converter" built on Markdown.