Re: Flicking through docs (was: Re: PDFs for user-guide, accessibility-guide and system-admin-guide)

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2006-03-10 at 07:24 +0000, Joachim Noreiko wrote:
> --- Matthew East <mdke ubuntu com> wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 2006-03-09 at 16:25 +0000, Joachim Noreiko
> > wrote:
> > > However, I do see your point about wanting to
> > > mouse-wheel through the whole thing to see what
> > > catches your eye.
> > > 
> > > After all, a book is made up of relatively short
> > > pages, and you can read one without being
> > distracted
> > > by the others.
> > > Yet you can also flick through the whole thing
> > very
> > > quickly.
> > > 
> > > Perhaps we can think of a way for yelp to allow
> > both
> > > kinds of behaviour.
> > 
> > Perhaps a "View Document on Single Page" option.
> > There is no need to
> > move away from rendering html to do this, of course.
> 
> Yes, that's pretty much what I was thinking.
> 
> Would we want an all-or-nothing toggle that does
> regular yelp or continuous page yelp, or should we
> allow the user to choose at what level to apply
> breaks?
> 
> Shaun, your thoughts?

I think it's very easy to get lost in a very long
scrolled page.  Books provide a lot of visual hints
that people work with almost subconsciously.  The
screen provides considerably fewer cues for linear
scanning.

As we move towards more topic-centric help, we'll
have a much less clear linear path through the
help.  Imagine printing Wikipedia.  How do you
serialize that sort of information?

The problem we're facing right now is that chunking
is an arbitrary breaking up of content.  You have
chunks that contain information on multiple topics,
and then you have topics that are explained across
multiple chunks.  What we want is for the chunk to
be a unit of information.

The page (the screen page, here loosely defined to
be everything you see when you move the scrollbar
up and down) is a very strong idiom.  But when you
present the information primarily with a section
hierarchy, and when the section-to-page mapping
doesn't actually follow the information flow of
the document, you completely lose out on the
benefits you can get from the page idiom.

Back to the question.  Yelp is designed, first and
foremost, to be an online help system for help with
user tasks.  The primary use case is finding some
particular piece of information quickly, and then
moving on with your life.  Peripheral reading is
secondary.

That means that we want to encapsulate units of
information as best as possible.  A page should
always contain succinct information on one topic.
Judicious use of cross links can provide extensive
peripheral information, far more than hierarchies
can, for those who want it.

The short answer, I suppose, is that the places
I want to take Yelp do not lend themselves to
being serialized.  Of course, that's also going
to present problems for the "Print This Document"
action.

Does any of what I just said make sense?

--
Shaun