* Michael Stenner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Thu, Jul 22, 1999 at 09:32:34AM +1000, Doug Young wrote: >> Will someone PLEASE get the message that the present >> format of MAN, HOWTO, and other stuff is NOT intelligible >> to the majority of newbies, and that is why there are so many >> postings on stuff regarded as trivial by experts !!!!!!!!!!!
Agreed, but we can help them finding the *good*, easy to understand documentation. And we can also tell them how to ask for help in a way that makes helping easy. > seems the list is still interested. I suggest that those who would > like to be involved in this more permanently let me know, and I'll > start constructing a "mini-list" that we can fall back to when the > interest dies down on debian-user. Just Cc:´ing to the addresses would be enough, I think. Please include me in this list. > What do you think about: > a) using html (this would help us -- we'd just mirror each other) We still need an ASCII document that tells newbies about lynx or Netscape in that case, IMO. > b) having a table of contents and index ( <- index might be hard ) --------------------------------------------^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Not too much if the base is SGML or (La)TeX. > c) trying to keep the documentation very short (ideally a page or > less) and step by step, with links to more complete info. This "very short documenation" should be in plain ASCII, IMO. It should include links, of course, whereever they may lead. I also think that the bigger newbie documentation you seem to have in mind (judging from the TOC and index reference) is already written, manyfold. We just need a "jump-station" to the best of them, put in a prominent place (/etc/motd was my suggestion for a jump-station to the jump-station). Cheers, Colin -- Colin Marquardt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
