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Phillips, Wanda had this to say:
> Generally, we use the topic title to indicate a larger goal
> (Measuring the Need to Reply) and then within the
> instructions choices, optional actions, and required actions
> are handled differently.
>
> Choices are listed (Perform one or more of the following:),
> optional actions begin with the goal (To include more
> respondants, do this.) or an indication of the optional
> status (If required, If desired), and required actions are
> simply stated (Select the names from the x list.)
For me, as a user, the problem arises when (a-la Microsoft, Adobe, and many more including open-source projects) the instructions obligingly say "to do this..." but they don't tell me - nor do they point to another help topic that would tell me - WHY I might want to do this, what the benefits and drawbacks of doing it might be, how necessary it is... In other words, in the world of "context-sensitive" I'm frequently stranded without context, and no obvious way to put a plausible one together.
This goes back to somebody else's comments about finding yourself confronted by instructions that assume you have already done a bunch of necessary things previously, and if you follow the current instructions without having done those pre-requisites, you get into all kinds of not-well-explained grief and murderous-rage-inducing wheel-spinning.
> We do, for regulatory reasons, include descriptions of every
> control, option, and piece of equipment and we do describe
> *every* OK click for much the same reason.
Regulatory reasons cover a multitude of sins, but they do protect our butts when courts have to take the regulations as guidance for "what a reasonable person should expect" or "what a reasonable person should have done".
- Kevin
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Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help
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