On Sun, 17 Nov 2002 01:26:02 +0100, John Marshall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >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). > Thank you for writing any documentation at all. Yes, I'd been mentally converting Ton to Tom for a few days now. Sorry Ton, that's a name that I've never run in to before and my brain translated it to something it expected. >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. > Ahh well. At least I was the first. >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. I think I'll do that. They load quite quickly over the net and I don't think they'll load any slower locally with the browser I'm using. Michael S. Harrison michaelh.dragonseye@com (reverse the dot and at to send email) * The opinions expressed here are those of my iguana * and I never know what he's going to say next. -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
