On Mon, 9 Oct 2000, Raymond S Brand wrote: > Its nice but please keep the alphabetical index also. >
Raymond, don't take this the wrong way, but every contribution that I have seen you make to this list so far has been a conservative one. Several times when I have proposed to remove something and replace it with something better, you have proposed keeping both. This is certainly a valid opinion, and I appreciate your feedback. However, you should realize that the end result of doing this will be an ugly, hard to to maintain, and not very useful set of documents. My experience in clear and effective writing is that what you remove is probably *more* important than what you leave in. I have several objections to leaving in the alphabetical listing: 1. It is superfluous. Anyone looking for a particular directive by name should be doing so in directives.html which is alphabetical. 2. It will add extra maintenance, and an extra listing which will tend to get out of sync. I have already been troubled by the dual modules indexes which have been a pain to maintain over their limited life. 3. It will make the file itself ugly and hard to use. Which should go first? If the alphabetic index goes first, then "browsers" will never find the new index. If the new index goes first, then we have lost any benefit to the alphabetic index, since it will be harder to find and use then the directives.html file. Just my opinion, of course. If you have an argument for keeping the alphabetic index that I have not addressed here, I would be very glad to here it. Joshua.
