With blog and wiki tools and technologies, are HTML, XHTML, and XML no longer needed?  Blogs and wikis allow you to type text entries and these technologies figure out how to display it, often with little or no tagging markup.  Their WYSIWYG interfaces continue to improve and expand.  As the technology advances, these tools may add processing that can identify list items, tables, and other types of content, and then automatically format them.

Much in the same way that Microsoft Word and PageMaker made desktop publishing more widely available and eliminated the need for tagging to achieve formatting, blogs and wikis are doing the same for the web.  You can use WordPress to create an entire web site without knowing or using HTML. Editme.com is providing web site services using wiki technologies.  These tools help users publish content with less knowledge of the underlying tagging.

However, although anyone can format text in Microsoft Word, well structured content requires the special skills of a technical communicator. Just because you can format a Word document without styles, doesn’t mean that’s the best way.  Technical communicators can structure and design the content to reduce future maintenance costs and deliver the content most effectively for the audience.  These tools and technologies allow technical communicators to shift their focus away from the publishing technologies and back to the content itself just like Microsoft Word and other tools allowed us to do in the days of desktop publishing.

Where will these tools and technologies take us?  Will they evaluate content semantically and apply formatting as needed?  Time will tell, but the web continues to grow as an information source, which encourages more people to share their ideas and experiences.  Social media is the buzzword of today.  So, what is the next technology wave…talking as you walk, and auto publishing those thoughts to your blog?  Don’t laugh…voice twitter could well be on the way.