On 11/17/2014 11:00 AM, Martin Packer wrote:
Consider the counterproposition: Nobody wants really ugly stuff. :-)
Cheers, Martin
Ah, but "the pursuit of excellence" has given way to "good enough".
-Steve Comstock
Martin Packer,
zChampion, Principal Systems Investigator,
Worldwide Banking Center of Excellence, IBM
+44-7802-245-584
email: [email protected]
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Blog:
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From: John McKown <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Date: 17/11/2014 17:52
Subject: Re: Redesigning the Principles of Operation Manual
Sent by: IBM Mainframe Assembler List
<[email protected]>
On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 11:31 AM, Paul Gilmartin <
[email protected]> wrote:
On 2014-11-16, at 15:43, Robin Vowels wrote:
HTML isn't something that a manual should be in.
It almost never prints properly (prints half-lines etc), doesn't have
organised
page numbers or index, etc etc.
Line lengths and page numbers are matters of presentation, not
semantics. Tim Berners-Lee et al. invented HTML for semantic
markup. Through decades it has been perverted to a presentation
bias by those who misguidedly value form over content.
​Unfortunately, this is the majority. Along the lines of "Why do men
prefer
beautiful women to intelligent women?" A: "Because men can see better than
they can think.". The same is true of most users. They like the eye candy,
not the information.
Indices, TOCs, and cross-references are quite practical in HTML.
They must contain hyperlinks to topics, not page nmbers. Many
(yet too few) HTML pages allow the viewer to re-flow text simply
by resizing a viewer window. Where suitable, such as
<PRE>program code</PRE> exist.
"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label
on
a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web,
when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another
computer, another word processor, or another network."
-- Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996
http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/
There would probably be value in a renderer from HTML
(semantic-oriented)
to hardcopy (perhaps via PDF), adding page numbers to ToCs, etc. But
printing a manual is *so* 20th Century.
​And so you correctly label both of my co-workers., the the first thing
they do is _physically print_ a PDF or even a web page if they want to
read
it "in depth". Personally, I prefer using my tablet or even my phone, if
I'm in the doctor's office.
-- gil
