On Sat, Nov 16, 2002 at 02:28:09PM -0600, Michael Harrison wrote:
> I think that yours and Tom's reply contain the key to my suprise. I
> was referencing the html documentation that was installed with
> prc-tools and when I go the "special projects" link installed by the
> cygwin installer, it only contains the top section (the online docs
> include the subsections on the same page). Something that's
> frustrating about the installed documentation is that it's divided up
> into hundreds of independent html files which makes reading related
> data cumbersome.
I think that somewhere in there you have misspelt "thank you for writing
any documentation at all" (as well as misspelling Ton's name).
In the two and a half years that I have been making HTML-formatted
downloads of these manuals available, you are the first to have
commented negatively on the way they are arranged.
There is a method to the madness.
The online versions are split into large pages containing whole chapters
because, when downloading over a perhaps slow link, it is useful to get
the material in large chunks.
But I found that the same arrangement was cumbersome for pages stored
locally: when, for example, you clicked on section "2.14.1 M680x0
Options" in the contents page of the GCC manual, it would take several
seconds to load the 345K web page containing Chapter 2 and then flick to
the right place, halfway down. By contrast, when the local manuals are
split into one page per node, one can get to the text of any node
instantaneously. Given that I had gone to the effort of downloading a
local copy of the manual, I found the delays very frustrating.
Because each page ends with a little table of contents listing its
subsections, I think it's easy enough to know when there is related data
to be read. I will grant you that the frustration you describe exists,
but it seemed to me that the other option's frustration (the delay) was
far greater. You might want to make local copies of the chapter-based
manuals and see whether you agree.
John
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