RE: Infocenter searches (Not!)

["Raikov, Lo" <Lo.Raikov@xxxxxxxxx>]

Tom:

I'm afraid the issue is a bit deeper than that. It's about hypertext vs.
book structure manual organization. My 0.02 is that although
hypertext+indexes can be better for finding answers to specific questions,
it is infinitesimally worse if one starts on a new subject and would like to
build a general mental picture of what it's all about. Infocenter
(hypertext) technology can win only insofar as "do first - read if failed"
approach wins on a big scale. Sadly, it almost did.

Lo

-----Original Message-----
From: thomas@inorbit.com [mailto:thomas@inorbit.com]
Sent: 21 ????? 2002 ?. 13:12
To: midrange-l@midrange.com
Subject: RE: Infocenter searches (Not!)


Buck:

On Wed, 20 March 2002, Buck Calabro wrote:

> They sure are.  I guess I wasn't smart enough to conceive of the notion
that
> a machine search could impute meaning to the search arguments I type in.
> I'll have to re-think that notion now that I see what you mean.

The search engines can be helped by site designers who make use of various
techniques such as <meta content="xxx yyy zzz"> tags in HTML. Searches can
be created or tuned or configured to index purely over text or purely over
meta-data or who knows how many variations. Decent configurations help the
intended audience to locate info with minimal waste.

HTML, SGML, etc., all of these have indexing support. An issue with
Infocenter seems to be that indexing simply was never thought about.

Tom Liotta

--
Tom Liotta
The PowerTech Group, Inc.
19426 68th Avenue South
Kent, WA 98032
Phone  253-872-7788
Fax  253-872-7904
http://www.400Security.com


___________________________________________________
The ALL NEW CS2000 from CompuServe
 Better!  Faster! More Powerful!
 250 FREE hours! Sign-on Now!
 http://www.compuserve.com/trycsrv/cs2000/webmail/




_______________________________________________
This is the Midrange Systems Technical Discussion (MIDRANGE-L) mailing list
To post a message email: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options,
visit: http://lists.midrange.com/cgi-bin/listinfo/midrange-l
or email: MIDRANGE-L-request@midrange.com
Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives
at http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l.