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this is a nice coincidence, I had a chat with a colleague about this this morning.
I'm in favour of simple numbered lists (1, 2, 3, ...).
Various reasons:
- We, the tech writers, indeed have to make a distinction between procedures and processes as infotypes (and change our style of writing accordingly). We cannot expect from the reader that he/she should make the same distinction. To him/her, it's just a sequence.
- The only visual difference between a step/action table and a stage/description table as defined by Information Mapping (IMAP) is the text in the cell heading (apart from the style of writing). Again, the reader just sees a sequence of events, he/she doesn't care whether they are steps (in a procedure) or stages (in a process).
- Localization: the terms "step", "action", "stage", "description" have to be translated as well and inconsistencies may appear (in spite of translation memory systems).
- Tables are helpful to present very structured information, but sometimes, they can be very complex to present something very simple (like a procedure). For example, If/Then tables embedded in Step/Action tables. And this complexity can present problems when doing the layout or when publishing your documentation to various media (HTML, XML, online help, ...). If you're developing templates or designing an information model for a DTD or Schema, you'll have a lot more work for the different types of tables. If you don't use step/action or stage/description tables, you could simply do with <list> and <listitem>.
