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When they can enter any character, what do you tell them?
Subject:When they can enter any character, what do you tell them? From:David Castro <thetechwriter -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 31 Aug 2001 06:55:22 -0700 (PDT)
I have an interesting, if trivial, quandary. If you are writing documentation
for the syntax users have to enter to use a feature, and they can separate
values provided in a field with anything they choose...or not separate them at
all, do you tell them that? Or do you tell them to use a particular character
to separate the values, just to reduce the chance of confusion?
Here's the syntax in question. To conditionalize content in a JSP file, users
of the tag library I am building can enter the following:
But they could separate the values with dashes, spaces, semicolons, or even
nothing. ...name="accessoracledb2foxpro"... is a perfectly-valid entry.
What would you do in this case? Tell them to use commas, just so that everyone
uses the same syntax, making it easier for everyone to read? Or would you leave
it up to them? It seems that it would be easier to explain if you just told
everybody to use one particular character...and the users are used to having to
follow rules.
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