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Subject:"From and to" to describe links? From:"Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 3 Jan 2001 09:05:16 -0500
Dan Mitchell is <<... writing procedures for nontechnical SMEs about how to
create hyperlinks... I want simple terms to use to refer to the document
that the link is in and the document to which it is linked. I tried
Departure Document and Destination Document, but they sound too techie.
Source and Destination also seem too techie. I'm thinking of referring to
them as the From Document and the To Document.>>
I'd probably choose "destination" or "target" for the file reached by
clicking the link and--as much as possible--omit the word "document" and any
long references to the source of the link. Context will generally make it
clear where the person is coming from (either "the current document" or "the
document containing the link", for example), and thus no new terminology is
necessary. So you'd say "create the link by [procedural bumf] and connect it
to the destination file [target?] by [more procedural bumf]. This creates a
link. When the user clicks on the link [something happens]". Note that in
the final sentence, the context is clear: the reader has just created a
link, so we can now refer to the link directly and trust the reader to know
where that link is. As a general rule of thumb, adopting this approach means
that you won't have to create a new term for something because the meaning
is clear from context.
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