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Subject:ToC for "Table of Contents"? From:Carl Stieren <carls -at- CYBERUS -dot- CA> Date:Thu, 15 Apr 1999 07:55:03 -0400
Dear Colleagues,
When we designed a new template for our HTML documentation, we came up with
a simple navigation bar at the top and bottom that contained three items of
text in it:
Index __________ < The Title of This Topic > __________ ToC | Expanded ToC
* Clicking on the index takes you to the index.
* Clicking on "The Title of This Topic" (not live) doesn't take you anywhere.
* Clicking on "<" takes you to the previous topic.
* Clicking on ">" takes you to next topic.
* Clicking on "ToC" takes you to the Table of Contents.
* Clicking on "Expanded ToC" takes you to the Expanded Table of Contents
Both "<" and ">" are actually triangular GIFs.
We did this in the context of a real page design (an Ad Hoc Committee on
Design), composed of the doc project leader (me), our graphic artist, and
five others set the requirements for the design, three people actually did
prototypes, we rated the prototypes and came up with a unified design that
one dissenter pronounced "a camel" and everyone else liked.
The one thing that worries me is that the abbreviation "ToC" might not be
known to systems administrators or to programmers (the users of our products).
What do TECHWR-Lers think? Does anyone have any experience or any data on this?
Since the product hasn't been released yet, we still have time to change
"ToC | Expanded ToC"
to something else that will fit in the space, for example,
"Contents | Expanded"
- Carl Stieren
P.S. This template is actually one of a set of three, but I just wanted to
give you the picture of how "ToC" fit into this environment.
Carl Stieren .....................................email: carls -at- cyberus -dot- ca
Technical Writer and Designer......................deep in Silicon Tundra
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.........................1 hr 40 min from Montreal
Carl's "Text and Subtext" Web Page..................www.cyberus.ca/~carls
