[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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