discuss: HOWTOs and Mini-HOWTOs
Subject:
Re: HOWTOs and Mini-HOWTOs
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
17 May 2002 05:57:20 -0000
Message-Id: <20020516190453.A1535@lafn.org>
On Wed, May 15, 2002 at 08:50:08PM -0400, Greg Ferguson wrote:
> On May 15, 10:38pm, Gilles Lamiral wrote:
> > Subject: Re: HOWTOs and Mini-HOWTOs
> >
> > > An observation; the distinction between HOWTOs and Mini-HOWTOs doesn't
> > > appear to be a useful one.
> >
> > They should be at least in the same directory. It is boring to
> > search the same things in several places.
>
> I'm all for merging them together. I think people tend to
> miss out on the mini's when they invoke the HOWTO Index,
> which is most likely a primary jump-off point (http://tldp.org/HOWTO/).
> They probably never click to get to the mini-HOWTO index.
When one clicks on HOWTOs on LDP's main page the first thing one finds
is the "HOWTO index" and a statement that it includes Mini-HOWTOs. But
I agree that the alphabetical indexes need to be changed to include the
both the Minis and regular HOWTOs in one index. One could try to
generate such an index from the LDP-database. It will display such an
index but it is likely not in the same layout as the ones on the
tldp.org website. Lampadas should be able to do this better.
There are a lot of people out there that expect to find mini-HOWTOs.
The minis are mentioned in books etc. and I don't think it would be
right for the mini designation to just suddenly disappear. Another
purpose of the mini prefix is to indicate that the HOWTO is short in
length. I know that this has not always been adhered to but we could
ask that overly long minis be converted to regular HOWTOs.
Some time in the future we might consider allowing just plain-text
submissions for Minis. Such text docs could be included with the html
tarball package (with the extension .txt). Browsers could read it and a
link in the downloaded Index would go to it. There would be no links
inside the text doc, but it should be easy to navigate within a short
doc even without links. So there may be a future need for the Mini
designation since for a larger regular HOWTO one needs links in it for
navigation.
Or we could say that we'll accept HTML format for Minis.
It seems reasonable to combine both types of HOWTOs in the same tarballs
for downloading and to state on the download page that Minis are
included. But I would still like to see the mini designation retained.
PS: On looking at the "jump-off" point to get to our HOWTOs on our
website, I've got some suggestions for improvement which I'll present in
a future post.
David Lawyer
