Sitting in a room

Brian Eno’s “illustrated talk” was funny, interesting, and defiantly low-tech. These are the bits I can remember.

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An opinionated guide to making videos for MDN

There are several reasons why videos are a terrible way to present technical documentation.

  • video is linear. People don’t read online documentation in a linear fashion, starting at the start and reading through to the end. They scan. Video is really hard to scan - it forces the user to consume the content start-to-finish.

  • video is less information-dense than text. It takes longer to watch a video of someone telling you something, than it does to read the thing.

  • video is big, often slow to load, and sometimes uses dodgy plugins.

  • video has accessibility problems: it’s harder to localize, or zoom, or use with screen readers.

It’s worth keeping these problems in mind, even when you are making videos, so you can try to alleviate some of them.

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