[ntp:questions] Twiki - who, what where?

Dale Worley worley at dragon.ariadne.com
Thu Aug 28 17:17:04 UTC 2003


"David L. Mills" <mills at udel.edu> writes:
> > At least for the basic information, there needs to be a pure-text version.
> 
> Can you elaborate? As I said previously, I tried hard in the NTP
> documentation to produce a format that browsers can exploit as well as
> trash editors. The only issue of consequence is that the trashers need
> to be able to do wordwrap. I'm not sure this is completely WAI
> compliant, but for us lowvision types, it ain't bad.

I did not mean to imply that NTP's documentation had that problem.
But as long as we were discussing documentation formats, I felt the
need to inject the idea of documentation readable without any special
tools.

(NTP's major documentation problem stems from its sheer *size*.  I
once read the documentation through from one end to the other, but it
took me four hours, and I'm sure that there are significant features
that I still do not understand.  It has gotten to the point where the
documentation needs to be carefully structured so that the user can
quickly find the parts that are relevant to his problem.
Unfortunately, it requires a good tech writer to do that, and I have
not heard of one volunteering for the task.)

In regard to Twiki, I have not studied it, but its HTML seems to be
reasonably friendly.  The main thing I would be concerned with is that
it appears to use tables and/or frames to put text into columns.
Column-formatted HTML can be more difficult to extract the text from,
either with normal tools or tools for the vision-limited, and simple
text-oriented browsers may not handle it well.  It would be helpful if
a user could Twiki put into a mode where the pages were not
column-formatted.  (Which might be relatively easy to implement.)

Dale



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