Re: Re[2]: Conventions, Intros, Overviews, Help, etc.

[Scott Miller <smiller -at- CORP -dot- PORTAL -dot- COM>]

I would use "From the File menu, choose Exit." No need for a convention
there.

I think that my violent hatred of the conventions page comes from
writing nothing but online help for several years. WIth online help,
random access for information about a specific task is what we expect,
so we can't use potentially confusing conventions like File>Save that
rely on a conventions page. (For naive audiences, anyway. For most
users, File>Save or File - Save is just fine, I think.)

If you can't rely on a conventions page in online help, you have to
figure out how to write things so that you don't need a conventions
page. However, I also think that you can't rely on a conventions page in
a book either. Books are just as randomly-accessed as online help,
perhaps even more so.

To be honest, though, the conventions page just says "stodgy old
documentation" to me. Call it a midlife crisis, but, like, yuck.

- Scott Miller
smiller -at- portal -dot- com

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> So, how would you handle explaining that "select File>Exit" means to
> select
> the file command, then select the Exit command from the File command
> drop-down list?