About online glossaries...

[mbarwick at invatron.com]

Greetings, all.

I'm in a position to determine what should happen in a new online help 
system and I'm curious as to what people are doing with their online 
glossaries (if they even have them).

Here are three possibilities I can envision:
1)  All glossary terms in one topic, which is linked to from the main 
introductory topic
2) All glossary terms in one topics, which is linked to from major topics 
or all perhaps even all topics
3) All glossary terms as separate topics with links to occurrences in 
topics (perhaps to appear as pop-ups)

#3 seems the right way to go because a single glossary topic is likely to 
go unread. If the user can access a term's definition simply by clicking, 
it seems to me it will more likely be used and frankly, it will be more 
useful. The only trouble is that the task of building all those links 
would be like indexing only worse, and take considerable time depending on 
the size of the help system. :-(

If you build online help, tell me what you're doing with your glossaries 
for I would dearly love to know. Only another tech writer could be so 
interested!

Best wishes,

Michael Barwick
Senior Information Developer
Invatron Systems Corp.
mbarwick -at- invatron -dot- com