xml-dev - Re: Improved writing -- who's going to pay for it?

[Rick JELLIFFE <ricko@geotempo.com>]

Robin Cover wrote:
 
> Superior pedagogical strategy
> may dictate altering the order of presentation in the
> tutorial/primer/guide (vis-a-vis the spec's fixed order) to
> match the learning style of the typical non-expert reader.
> But with links, order doesn't matter so much: one "clicks" to the
> related discussion that stands in the way of understanding
> momentarily.   

As well as the example of Tim Bray's Annotated XML, I am reminded
that there were (at least) three versions of the SGML spec in
common use in the early 1990s:  ISO's, Goldfarb's and Exoterica's
inhouse
version, all of which used different order or had different indexing
and linking or annotations.  

I was playing with ideas for re-arranging the XML Schemas spec for nicer
effect: one thing would be to collapse all the constraint boxes, to 
give a less interrupted flow for people trying to bootstrap their
knowledge from it (and who will therefore try to treat is as linear
narrative text and
not reference material). 

Rick Jelliffe