| ▲ | teddyh 4 hours ago | |
Whenever the discussion comes up about man pages and how documentation should be organized, I like to quote this section from the GNU coding standards about how Info documentation is structured: ---- Programmers tend to carry over the structure of the program as the structure for its documentation. But this structure is not necessarily good for explaining how to use the program; it may be irrelevant and confusing for a user. Instead, the right way to structure documentation is according to the concepts and questions that a user will have in mind when reading it. This principle applies at every level, from the lowest (ordering sentences in a paragraph) to the highest (ordering of chapter topics within the manual). Sometimes this structure of ideas matches the structure of the implementation of the software being documented--but often they are different. An important part of learning to write good documentation is to learn to notice when you have unthinkingly structured the documentation like the implementation, stop yourself, and look for better alternatives. […] In general, a GNU manual should serve both as tutorial and reference. It should be set up for convenient access to each topic through Info, and for reading straight through (appendixes aside). A GNU manual should give a good introduction to a beginner reading through from the start, and should also provide all the details that hackers want. […] That is not as hard as it first sounds. Arrange each chapter as a logical breakdown of its topic, but order the sections, and write their text, so that reading the chapter straight through makes sense. Do likewise when structuring the book into chapters, and when structuring a section into paragraphs. The watchword is, at each point, address the most fundamental and important issue raised by the preceding text. <https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#GNU-Manual...> | ||
| ▲ | cxr 3 hours ago | parent [-] | |
> Programmers tend to carry over the structure of the program as the structure for its documentation[…] the right way to structure documentation is according to the concepts and questions that a user will have in mind when reading it. That's also the right way to structure the program. Deficient compilers and bad advice have done serious damage to source code comprehensibility. | ||