[svnbook commit] r1750 - trunk/src/en/book
C. Michael Pilato
cmpilato at red-bean.com
Tue Oct 25 14:45:45 CDT 2005
Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:
> I'm not sure I agree. When a table is presented, it's the 'keys' that
> are the things being looked up. My original motivation for the table
> was to help people quickly answer the question: "I'm using <blah>
> software, what sort of DAV abilities does it have?"
This does not constitute a disagreement with what I said. I merely
meant that for a table of this size, the "values" are as easy to find as
the "keys", especially since you had them sorted by the values instead
of the keys anyway. If you were really trying to quickly answer the
question, "What does my software FOO do WebDAVvily?" you would have
sorted the list by the names of the softwares instead of employing
semi-random sorting and grouping them by the categories you define in
the surrounding text.
> By ordering the table as you do above, you're answering a different
> question: "what apps use DAV implementation <blah>?" And I don't
> think that's a common question. People don't walk into this chapter
> knowing about the different sorts of DAV implementations, so they're
> not likely to ask that question (even if they've just read the
> implementation definitions).
I kinda doubt the claim that this is the more common question. But
granted, I haven't been swimming in the users at subversion.t.o list for
quite some time -- I can defer to you here.
But let's get beyond this, shall we? As I stated, I don't care if you
put a table in the appendix, but I /do/ care that it employ the layout
that best achieves the goal. If the goal is, "Tell folks what software
FOO does", then tell them directly, without unnecessary intersection
tracing:
*Software
* *Type
* *Description
*
Adobe Photoshop
standalone WebDAV application
Able to read from and write to WebDAV URLs
Cadaver
standalone WebDAV application
command-line WebDAV client utility
DAV Explorer
standalone WebDAV application Java-based GUI WebDAV client utility
dav2fs
WebDAV filesystem implementation
Linux filesystem module
...
I think you'll find this to be much more useful as a quick reference --
more information presented in a more straightforward way.
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