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Subject:RE: too many hyperlinks in a topic? From:"Jones, Donna" <DJones -at- zebra -dot- com> To:<techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Mon, 18 Sep 2006 11:27:19 -0500
René,
Speaking as an end-user and not as a help-file creator, I think that "too many links" means that there isn't enough actual content on individual pages. I don't want to have to follow a different link for each tidbit of information related to a particular topic. That's highly irritating.
I also don't want to get caught in a circle of references that all refer to each other without one of them actually telling me what I need to know. I seem to remember older versions of FrameMaker's online help doing that, and I hated it. In an effort to keep their help screens short, they put very little content on each page and linked you all over the place to get information. But sometimes they forgot to include actual substance on any of the screens, so you never found what you were looking for and simply wound up back on the screen where you started. FrameMaker's current help screens are much better, and I find that I actually like using them. When you click a topic in the help Contents window, you get a TOC for that topic, and each topic screen has quite a lot on it. I have to scroll in some of the windows, but I don't care because what's there is good information. They still have links to other topics here and there, but these topics aren't usually an integral part of what I'm reading about. They're usually supplemental.
I think the moral of the story is not to hypercorrect to solve one potential problem and wind up creating others. Tell the readers what they need to know without letting rules for metrics (the length of the topic, the number of links on a page, the number of steps in a procedure, the number of words in a sentence) completely dictate what you do. Common sense is a wonderful tool that we sometime underutilize. :-)
Donna
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