Re: glossary

[skud netizen com au]

On Fri, Jun 09, 2000 at 01:20:51PM -0400, Alexander Kirillov wrote:
> 
> Hi, guys/girls:
> 
> thanks to help from skud, the glossary has really progressed - take a
> look at http://www.math.sunysb.edu/~kirillov/glossary
> 
> However, I became confused about what we really want. Do we want it to
> be like a dictionary, with detailed descriptions? Or a very short

A dictionary *doesn't* have detailed descriptions.  An encyclopedia,
yes, but not a dictionary.  Most dictionaries provide as many
concise/brief definitions as are needed to explain the term, and
probably a pronunciation guide and etymology.  The latter two are
unlikely to be necessary for our glossary, though I admit the etymology
would be fascinating.

We need to think about what the glossary's meant to be used for.  If, as
was discussed recently, it's meant to be linked to from other documents
which want definitions of words (eg "applet"), I don't think we want to
distract the reader with an essay on the history and implementation of
applets.  Rather, we should just tell them what an applet is so they can
get on with reading the help file they originally set out to do.

Recall, also, the sort of UI we were talking about implementing this
with.  One suggestion was "bubble" help, another was a small subwindow
at the bottom of the main text.  Both would be unsuitable for displaying
more than a paragraph of text.

> definition, say one line?  Will it be supplemented by an index or some
> kind of search engine? How they should interact? Or it should be both
> glossary and index in one? 

I think the index would be separate.  Take a look at, for instance
O'Reilly's "Programming Perl" (the Camel book) which contains both a
glossary and an index, for an example.

K.

-- 
Kirrily Robert -- <skud@netizen.com.au> -- http://netizen.com.au/
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