--- Steve Rickaby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Surely the answer here is 'horses for courses'? > There are many areas where numbering is either > appropriate or essential (engineering manuals,legal > documents, political documents, medical documents, > repair manuals, ya-de-yah), and others where it is > not. Legal is one special case: due to its density, > every *paragraph* is often numbered. ========================================== The essence of the reason for numbering in the document types I (and you) cited is multi-fold: 1. It eliminates ambiguity 2. It facilitates rapid access 3. It minimizes mistakes, and speeds up access, particularly when you are working off-line with a paper copy, in which case hyperlinks are unavailable. When you reference something by its title instead of by an unique number, it creates two problems: (a) How do you find it in a large document, whereas referencing by a number tells you exactly where it's located, and (b) technical manualsoften have many instances of very similar titles, and users are more likely to go to the wrong one.
For these reasons, I contend that that nearly all technical manuals fall into the same category as engineering documents, legal documents, medical documents, etc., because all of those types share the urgent necessity of avoiding mistakes caused by looking up the wrong reference. Dan Emory & Associates FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to Framers as [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send list messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.