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Subject: RE: [dita-help] Layering in Help Systems
Greetings Tony, and Happy 2009 to you too! Thanks for starting the new year with such an interesting question. I believe that information layering is a very important technique in user assistance since our aim is to make the best possible use of the (usually quite restricted) screen real estate that we have available. Also, hiding information and making it available only "on request" is a great way of keeping Help topics concise and more inviting, especially for novice users. I think it is possible to create a fairly rigid set of rules for when information layering should be applied. In response to your example: I would say that, having established a convention for presenting footnotes, this convention should be applied consistently throughout. The only argument I can think of against using a popup in a specific instance would be if the amount of information displayed was too large -- but then, in that case it probably wouldn't have been appropriate to mark it up as a footnote in the DITA source. Taking your other example of glossary terms, there is an argument for only implementing an expansion link for the *first* occurrence of a specific glossary term within any given topic. All of the Help Authoring Tools that support glossary term linking provide this as an option. They also typically enable "ad hoc" glossary term linking, but I don't see any good reason for this. Other examples of information types that might be implemented as layers are: -- Images: these take up valuable space within a user assistance window and are often omitted altogether -- however, it might be a good idea to make them "user selectable". Arguably it is less possible or desirable to apply this as a rigid rule since there are likely to be specific images (perhaps icons and buttons) that are critical to the effectiveness of the user assistance and should not be layered -- Tips: If layered, then they should have a meaningful and explicit hotspot or trigger (not simply the word "Tip" since this provides no clue as to the nature or relevance of the information) -- Examples -- Task sub-steps -- Task main steps in cases where multiple tasks are chunked into a single topic -- this rule could be difficult to implement since it would not make sense to layer task steps in the more usual case of a task topic consisting of a single set of steps. Having said the above, my primary aim when applying information layers within user assistance is to ensure that the entire topic (beginning and end, but not necessarily all the detail in between) can be displayed to the user without scrolling being required. If the topic consisted *only* of a short example, then it would not make sense (from a usability perspective) to layer it. On the other hand, if a topic consisted of six headings, then it might make sense to layer the content of those six sections irrespective of the nature of the information. This suggests that, purely from the perspective of usability, a Help-centric "layering" element might be useful. However, on balance I would not be in favour of this due to the lack of structure and predictability that this would introduce. Best regards, -Matthew -----Original Message----- From: Tony Self [mailto:tself@hyperwrite.com] Sent: 06 January 2009 08:39 To: dita-help@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: [dita-help] Layering in Help Systems Greetings Colleagues, and Happy 2009! I'm interested in everybody's thoughts on whether layering features in Help systems can be applied globally based on semantic mark-up, or whether there is a need for "ad hoc" layering. By layering, I mean features such as popups, expansion links and dropdown links. By "ad hoc", I mean an author choosing that this lump of text would be best presented to the user in a dropdown, for example. As an example, let's say we render a footnote <fn> in the HTML output from a DITA collection as a popup. Can we apply a rule that says "in all cases (for this Help system), <fn> elements will be rendered as popups"? Or will there be an instance where we need to say "oh, THIS <fn> needs to be treated differently". If we further assume that a transformation process somehow links any <term> elements with a corresponding glossary entry into an expansion link to that glossary entry, can we safely way that this will happen in all instances within the help system? I'm trying to explore whether we actually need different semantic elements for "Help" features. It would be philosophical sound if we could avoid having help-centric DITA elements that ended up embedding presentation information in the content. Or having some type of DITA mark-up that only applied to Help systems. What do you all think? Regards Tony Self --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this mail list, you must leave the OASIS TC that generates this mail. Follow this link to all your TCs in OASIS at: https://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/portal/my_workgroups.php
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