Speaking as someone who is not a computer professional, the biggest
bugbear of howto's and doco's generally is assumed knowledge.
Of this, the worst part is acronyms. Imagine someone who has no idea what
an rpm is, or ppp, or chap, or the zillions of others. In fact (from
experience) it is often very hard to find even index entries, much less
detail descriptions of many of these acronyms or abreviations.
I believe that most geeks and guru's forget that they are not part of the
normal conversation of humans.
David.
On Tue, 30 May 2000, Sonam Chauhan wrote:
>
> True. However many how-to's assume (or hint at)
> background Unix/ computing knowledge. This is pretty
> intimidating for newcomers, but essentially unavoidable
> where there's only one author.
>
> How about a meta-howto? If we take a fairly advanced howto and
> riddle it with:
> - annotations
> - step-wise instructions
> - links to more resources
> - printer friendly formats (many people like printing FAQ et al)
> it would be more accessible. Most authors won't mind their
> how-to's being used in this manner.
>
> A web based annotation engine (like thirdvoice for Linux would be great)
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux Users Group Mailing List - http://www.slug.org.au
To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
unsubscribe in the text
