On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 08:47:34PM +0100, Andreas Jung wrote:
--On 20. Dezember 2005 14:27:18 -0500 Paul Winkler <pw_lists@slinkp.com> wrote:
just to be clear, the stuff I'm talking about is ZMI user interface docs, not programmer docs.
I'll raise the question again: what are the benefits of the HelpSys for a Zope user? I just clicked through the HelpSys (I've never used and missed it throughout my Zope career) and all the unorganized information in the HelpSys are more or less in the same way available in the Zope Book (ZPT, DTML references etc.).
The big difference is that in many places in the ZMI, clicking "help" takes you to instructions *for the management page you are actually looking at*. Just because you and I have internalized all this information long ago does not mean it isn't useful to new users. I haven't looked at any of it recently because I don't need to anymore. But I remember when I *did* need to. The users affected most by this change are not going to be on zope-dev. Maybe I was a rare case and nobody else ever reads the help pages. I don't think we will find out by arguing about it here. Maybe a straw poll on the main zope list would teach us something? Something like "Did you, at some point while learning Zope, get anything useful from the help system?".
- additional information and story telling should be done through doc tests
For general "what is this / what does it do / how does it work" docs, I like that idea. But it doesn't help with filling out forms in the ZMI. Arguably, forms should be self-documenting, but the nice thing about a "help" link is that it doesn't distract you when you don't need it any more. -- Paul Winkler http://www.slinkp.com