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Subject:Re: Sam Clemens is dead From:"K. Edgcombe" <ke10 -at- CUS -dot- CAM -dot- AC -dot- UK> Date:Tue, 11 Oct 1994 09:35:28 GMT
>RoMay Sitze said:
> I vote for
>emphasizing the important things, and keeping the rest as simple as
>possible.
>******************
How could anyone possibly disagree?
Surely the question you have to look at is whether you deliberately
choose to omit useful information, in the interests of producing
shorter manuals? A useful discussion could take place about this,
but we must recognise that "keep it simple" often means
"leave things out".
The most frustrating manuals, of course, achieve neither
brevity nor completeness, but it's no use pretending we
can do both (and I haven't mentioned intelligibility).
It used to be common to have three levels of manual:
the introduction and tutorial, which was neither brief
nor complete, but (sometimes) intelligible,
the "users' guide" which was fairly brief and intended
to be read by most users, and the reference manual,
which was very rarely read but did contain all the
information relevant to users, and was properly indexed.
Should we be discussing which of these, if any, can
usefully be (a) minimalised (b) replaced by online
documentation?
