Re: document title usability
As for usability guidelines - they're like bellybuttons. Everybody has one
and they are all superfluous and smell funny. (Have you ever smelled your
bellybutton - its disgusting.)
How do you know what my bellybutton smells like?
To smell your own sounds anatomically impossible, like a certain commonly used imperative phrase - but maybe we shouldn't go there.
Actually, I'm kind of sorry that I brought the subject up.
For every perceived or real usability violation there is an equal and
opposite guideline. Readability is the most recent nonsense to consume
tech writing in the last few years. Its just a way to make personal
preference seem more "authorative."
Far be it from me to get in the way of a good flow of hyperbole. However, while I see the point, I think it's worth adding that the problem is - and the reason that any type of writing, even tech-writing is an art or craft rather than a science - is that there is no single way to increase readability.
In any given case there is usually a number of word choices or structures that clearly express the point, and some that obviously do a poorer job. Sometimes, too, knowing the conventions of what you're writing will encourage you to reject certain choices. But that's as far as readability can really go.
In this case, the original titles are based on an old, old convention. The suggested revisions would work, but why bother when the original titles are perfectly understandable and you're on a tight deadline?
--
Bruce Byfield 604.421.7177 bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com
"We thought that Brody's cat would save us from our plight,
She buried that old haggis where she does her jobs at night,
But early the next morning came a knocking at the door,
The pudding sat a-panting - the cat was seen no more."
-The Mollys,"The Haggis"
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