licentious radio

Saturday, March 9, 2002
[10:35:56 PM]

CSS tip: With cascading stylesheets, you can specify font sizes. If you must use pixels for the font size, please use a relative measure for the line height.

This works better when users set a minimum font size, or when (at least for Netscape 4) they increase the size of the text. If you say text should be 11px/18px, and someone has 15px as the minimum font size, 18px isn't going to yield enough line spacing for normal text. Better to use line-height: 1.5.

[11:27:49 AM]
Documentation should be written for people who don't want to learn.

People working on internet systems commonly deal briefly and infrequently with dozens of technologies. We typically need procedural information about the most common uses of a program or feature. We typically don't need complete reference information sans examples. We typically don't need examples tailored to require us to learn some percentage of reference information before we can understand the example.

Consider unix man pages. Man pages should surely exist, and it's wonderful to have complete reference information. Occassional users would be served with examples for common uses.

For example: use unix find command to find a file under a directory:

find /usr -name httpd

On my man page, the -name switch appears on line 122, well after -cmin, -cnewer, -mmin, etc.

If you don't use find very often, it would be much more convenient if an example like the one above came early in the man page. "Examples of common use" would be a good section to add to all reference documents. Then create examples from which an overworked, moderately intelligent person can interpolate to solve many problems.

[10:34:21 AM]
Ha ha. Carly Fiorina says: "The biggest risk of the merger is not strategy, but execution." No wonder HP employees don't like the idea.