Re: PROPOSAL: UISG Menu Line Standardization

[Preben Randhol <randhol dusken4 samfundet ntnu no>]

* Bowie Poag
| On 7 Aug 1998, Preben Randhol wrote:
| 
| > * Bowie Poag
| > | > 
| > | > What if their is no online help available? Would the Help menu still
| > | > exist, with About as the only menu option? Seems a little odd to have an
| > | > entire toplevel menu that only contains the one menu item, especially
| > | > one that would make just as much sense to be placed under Program... 
| > | 
| > | Under the UISG, if no application-specific help is available, a simple
| > | generic document for "Help with using GNOME" appears by default.
| > 
| > The UISG should state that every program should have a help page.
| 
| This kind of stuff (user-end documentation) is a little difficult to
| mandate, simply because programmers dont really like writing
| documentation. :) Its very hard to set it into stone that ALL developers
| must include user dox with their apps upon releasing them, simply because
| a programmer's free time should preferably be spent coding, not writing
| dox. :)

No offence but the old cliche that the programmer should program not
write docs is utterly rubbish. It's futile. Just look at the GDK
library it isn't documented one bit which makes it very hard to
use. The GTK and GNOME libs are also poorly documented, but here there
is improvement.

| 
| I think most coders understand the need for documentation -- Its just very
| low on their list of priorities, and sometimes even non-existant on their
| list of "to do" 's..

But you want to encourage this behaviour? I would like to see a person
(mathematician) use octave with no prior knowledge of octave nor
matlab and with no docs.

-- 
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