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>Solution: Use a Graph Is this the new "Solution: Use Regular Expressions"? There is a good reason tutorial style documentation is linear. Humans can keep tra
by unfamiliar 10y ago
>Solution: Use a Graph
Is this the new "Solution: Use Regular Expressions"?
There is a good reason tutorial style documentation is linear. Humans can keep track of what page of a book they are on, not which nodes of a graph they have visited.
Otherwise this doesn't add any new insight that wasn't there when the web was created. It's basically talking about hyperlinked documents. Identifying it as a graph doesn't help understand it any more than identifying the rotational groups of NaCl molecules lets me understand why they taste salty. It's useless structure/abstraction hunting.
- kmill 10y agoI spent some time researching hypertext pre-web, and an old idea (Vannevar Bush old) is having "trails" through your document store, each basically giving a narrative one could follow. Sun used that terminology for their Java tutorials, though it seems the nodes along the trails are unique to a particular tutorial. I could see something like this being useful for understanding a complex and complicated document like a programming language specification. The trails would show which sections and subsections work together to produce a particular behavior users should understand. I've also seen dependency graphs given in the preface to certain math textbooks, which is nice when you know what it is you want to know (and I wish more textbooks would be available in hypertext form).
- quietplatypus 10y agoThe idea of looking up particular sequences of documents to demonstrate actual behaviors is very compelling. Too often, documentation follows a precise but necessarily boring and unintuitive format. Having traces through documentation for common tasks would be very useful.
- andrewflnr 10y agoYou have a problem, so you think "I'll represent this as a graph." Now you have O(n^2) problems. With that said, I'm so, so guilty. :)