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People do not read the documentation through. They dip into a specific spot in pursuit of one instruction on how to accomplish their task of the moment. As far as the reader is concerned, therefo...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2020-01-03T20:41:57Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33602 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T08:04:59Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33602 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
System
·
2019-12-08T08:04:59Z (almost 5 years ago)
People do not read the documentation through. They dip into a specific spot in pursuit of one instruction on how to accomplish their task of the moment. As far as the reader is concerned, therefore, Every Page is Page One. There is no rest of the manual. There is only this page. It is all I am looking at, all I am interested in looking at, and all I am going to look at. If the information I need to complete my task successfully is not on that page, then as far as I am concerned it is not in the documentation. The DRY doctrine only applies, if it applies at all, to unit that the reader actually uses. For instance, you would never invoke DRY to justify not including a piece of information because it was already in a manual for a different product that you released 10 years ago. DRY can only be applied to the context of use, and the context of use is the page, not the manual that contains the page, but the individual page the reader is looking at. Because that is all they are going to look at. Every Page is Page One.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2018-01-31T15:08:21Z (almost 7 years ago)
Original score: 6