Re: thoughts on documentation reuse.

[Juergen Schoenwaelder <schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>]

>>>>> Wes Hardaker writes:

Wes> My (unexplained) thinking is that people write text in two ways:

Wes> 1) a document which defines the object itself and is intended to
Wes> be very full and explanatory, but wouldn't look good at all if it
Wes> was cut-n-pasted directly into another document.

Wes> 2) A string which is known to be "exported" is likely to be
Wes> cleaner and be a better summary.

Wes> I thought about importing the entire DESCRIPTION clause itself,
Wes> but it just seemed that if the original author didn't realize
Wes> that his text might be used somewhere else would likely not write
Wes> it in a fashion that would be well written for somewhere else.

Does reproducing text really help for those that do not read?

If I see a data type in a program and I need to know more about it, I
have to go to the place where it is defined to see the details.  This
is really not that hard to do. And for those who find it too hard,
there are already tools and Web pages that generate HTML versions for
MIBs where you just have use the mouse.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder    <http://www.informatik.uni-osnabrueck.de/schoenw/>