From: Jeremiah Foster (jeremiannika@attbi.com)
Date: Sat Feb 01 2003 - 20:12:15 EST
Yeah. I agree.
On Sat, 2003-02-01 at 18:46, r coyne wrote:
> First, your "documentation" essentially consists
> entirely of menu trees, i.e., where to find the
> command. But the whole point of menus and windowing
> shells generally is supposed to be to eliminate or
> greatly reduce the need for that sort of thing. *snip*
You're right, the GUI should be obvious.
> my suggestion is that you need to include *other*
> information as well.
So I guess you are saying that a how-to should aim for the sweet spot
that adds information to intermediate users and explains things to the
novice?
> Which brings us to MS's (and abiword's) second
> blunder: The SaveAs dialog is unclear and rather
> frightening because it confuses and conflates two
> totally separate ideas/issues, namely file *type*,
> i.e., format, and filename *extension*. What I want
> to know is, What will this thing *do* if I click it.
> With "save as Word doc" I can sort of guess, because I
> know that Word and abi each have a whole bunch of
> internal formatting codes that are not the same, and
> presumably what I get is a file that uses the Word
> codes to correspond to and thus produce in Word a
> document that looks more or less the same as the abi
> one. But what does it *mean* to "save as HTML"? An
> HTML document/file simply *is* text. So will Save As
> HTML simply strip out all the abw complexities to
> produce straight, old-fashioned text and then tack
> ".html" on the end of my specified filename? Or will
> it try to translate the abi formatting codes into HTML
> formatting tags so as to make it look alike in a
> browser, as for the Word case? But that's only
> layout; what about links? Will anything that looks
> like an Internet address be duplicated (and expanded
> into a full URL) in a HTML tag to make it function as
> an active link in the HTML document? That's the sort
> of thing Yahoo news does, and it's often stupidly
> inappropriate and annoying; does abi do it better?
> And if there are images and frames and the like in the
> abi document, the sorts of things that HTML does by
> referring to separate files, will such files be
> generated? Where will they be put and what will they
> be called?
I will try to cover some of this stuff.
> you should tell us *something*, enough to give me a
> basic, sketchy understanding of what's about to
> happen, so that I can figure out whether it's what I
> want and whether it's safe and what I'll need to do
> later. Without that much, I am left feeling I don't
> dare click anything, because who knows what it might
Yeah, I agree, and that is what makes a good how to hard when you have a
program with so many options. If you just want to burn a data CD, the
how-to can be a complete reference. A program like AbiWord has so many
potential how-tos
> And -- especially since you do offer this
> in hypertext format -- you should include a full set
> of references/links to the complete documentation, for
> those who want more info.
I should link to the documentation. I am unsure why I did not do this.
Thanks for the feedback.
+ Jeremiah
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