Re: Part 1 of beginner's course written

Hey Frank, hope you're doing well back over in CA!

I suppose we are using "Summary" in the literal sense - it is a summary of what the article covers, which can also be used out of context, e.g. a list of article abstracts. While that usually comes at the end of an article, it shouldn't necessarily have to, strictly speaking.

But…the general convention seems to be introduction or overview at the start, summary or conclusion at the end. So I'd agree that we should look into changing this.

Does anyone else think this is a problem?

Chris Mills
Opera Software, dev.opera.com
W3C Fellow, web education and webplatform.org
Author of "Practical CSS3: Develop and Design" (http://goo.gl/AKf9M)

On 15 Apr 2013, at 19:56, Frank M. Palinkas <fmpalinkas@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Chris,
> 
> Just thought I'd mention this, it's been bugging me for a while: 
> 
> Why is "Summary" being used as the first topic on every page? IMHO as a tech writer, a "Summary" topic belongs at end of a document, with an "Overview" or "Introduction" topic at the start. A CMS problem maybe?
> 
> You may considered this a trite point, but users who are not native English speakers may have difficulty understanding why this is occurring at the beginning instead of at the end of the doc's content.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Frank M. Palinkas
> Senior Technical Writer
> Quixey, Inc., Mountain View, California
> Mobile: +1 650 248 5315
> Web Accessibility and Standards tutorials: http://dev.opera.com/author/947856
> 
> 
> On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 11:28 AM, Chris Mills <cmills@opera.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Today I've put together a first draft of the beginner's course:
> 
> http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/beginners/the_beginning
> 
> Let me know what you think. Does the language hit the mark for complete beginners? Is this too much theory up front? The next Part dives straight into practical coding, and I've tried to keep this as short as possible.
> 
> 
> Chris Mills
> Opera Software, dev.opera.com
> W3C Fellow, web education and webplatform.org
> Author of "Practical CSS3: Develop and Design" (http://goo.gl/AKf9M)
> 
> 
>

Received on Monday, 15 April 2013 19:26:35 UTC