On Friday, April 4, 2003, at 10:27 AM, Tony Collen wrote:
Do you mean reinforce the distinctions between a How-To and a Tutorial? I agree with what you did.
Nope, in fact, ideally, I think we should get rid of one of the terms and
choose the other. The choice to make Tutorials all of the off-site links
was mostly arbitrary. The only relation I saw on the Tutorials page was
that all of the links except 2 were off-site, and the 2 on-site links were
described as "How to $whatever". It just seemed natural.
No, let's not get rid of Tutorial classification. I've said this before on cocoon-dev, but I'll repeat it here.
Sometimes you just need a basic how-to to accomplish something. Simple steps for those of us with *no* time to learn something new each and every time we happen to do something new. It would be nice to master this or that concept every time we do something different, but the reality remains that we don't have enough time -- at least initially. By contrast, tutorials should teach, as well as show how. While tutorials contain how-to information, they **also** contain conceptual information. How-Tos are primarily just the facts, not much more. Tutorials help you apply knowledge to a range of problems, not just the problem at hand. In fact, a tutorial may have multiple how-to parts.
Now I realize there is a continuum between the two doc types, but please let's not lose the distinction. It's important that we encourage authors to write tutorials. You could even take an existing how-yo and turn it into a yutorial.
I'll post the distinctions somewhere on wiki over the weekend.
Diana
