On Fri, 2006-03-10 at 07:24 +0000, Joachim Noreiko wrote: > --- Matthew East <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On Thu, 2006-03-09 at 16:25 +0000, Joachim Noreiko > > wrote: > > > However, I do see your point about wanting to > > > mouse-wheel through the whole thing to see what > > > catches your eye. > > > > > > After all, a book is made up of relatively short > > > pages, and you can read one without being > > distracted > > > by the others. > > > Yet you can also flick through the whole thing > > very > > > quickly. > > > > > > Perhaps we can think of a way for yelp to allow > > both > > > kinds of behaviour. > > > > Perhaps a "View Document on Single Page" option. > > There is no need to > > move away from rendering html to do this, of course. > > Yes, that's pretty much what I was thinking. > > Would we want an all-or-nothing toggle that does > regular yelp or continuous page yelp, or should we > allow the user to choose at what level to apply > breaks? > > Shaun, your thoughts?
I think it's very easy to get lost in a very long scrolled page. Books provide a lot of visual hints that people work with almost subconsciously. The screen provides considerably fewer cues for linear scanning. As we move towards more topic-centric help, we'll have a much less clear linear path through the help. Imagine printing Wikipedia. How do you serialize that sort of information? The problem we're facing right now is that chunking is an arbitrary breaking up of content. You have chunks that contain information on multiple topics, and then you have topics that are explained across multiple chunks. What we want is for the chunk to be a unit of information. The page (the screen page, here loosely defined to be everything you see when you move the scrollbar up and down) is a very strong idiom. But when you present the information primarily with a section hierarchy, and when the section-to-page mapping doesn't actually follow the information flow of the document, you completely lose out on the benefits you can get from the page idiom. Back to the question. Yelp is designed, first and foremost, to be an online help system for help with user tasks. The primary use case is finding some particular piece of information quickly, and then moving on with your life. Peripheral reading is secondary. That means that we want to encapsulate units of information as best as possible. A page should always contain succinct information on one topic. Judicious use of cross links can provide extensive peripheral information, far more than hierarchies can, for those who want it. The short answer, I suppose, is that the places I want to take Yelp do not lend themselves to being serialized. Of course, that's also going to present problems for the "Print This Document" action. Does any of what I just said make sense? -- Shaun _______________________________________________ gnome-doc-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-doc-list
