[181] in IS Home Pages
re: Changing top page for certificates
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (oliver thomas)
Tue Aug 25 16:41:52 1998
To: Suzana Lisanti <lisanti@MIT.EDU>
Cc: is-home@MIT.EDU, jag@MIT.EDU, smyser@MIT.EDU, ridgway@MIT.EDU
Cc: oliver thomas <othomas@MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: oliver thomas <othomas@MIT.EDU>
In-Reply-To: your message of Tue, 25 Aug 1998 16:12:44 -0400.
<v03020909b208c3913177@[18.164.0.74]>
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 16:41:45 EDT
From: oliver thomas <othomas@MIT.EDU>
i'm not so much concerned about links breaking, as i am about existing
documents becoming confusing because of this.
please see <http://web.mit.edu/olh/Tutorial/Tutorial.html#web> as an
example. this is the athena tutorial, which, in printed form, is given
out to all new students registering for an athena account. it includes
very detailed instructions on getting certificates, as well as detailed
screen shots of the document found at http://web.mit.edu/is/help/cert/
i think including a note at the end of the document saying that there
exist other documents, with a link to the toc.html file is one thing.
significantly altering the document found at
http://web.mit.edu/is/help/cert/index.html
is another, and is, i think, not advisable at this time.
from a reference perspective i think it would be a good thing to inventory
all certificate documents and to have that list easily accessible.
(note that the file
http://web.mit.edu/is/help/cert/toc.html
is not a complete inventory of certificate docs out there. it's missing
at least the network document and the student services faq.
http://web.mit.edu/accounts/www/certificates/
has a somewhat more complete list, but i suspect that there are some other
free agents out there that are missing...)
however, from a new-user friendliness perspective (which should be a
priority at this time of the year), i think too many choices up-front are
a bad thing. http://web.mit.edu/is/help/cert/ should be the document that
steps people through getting certificates BEFORE telling them that there
are other documents out there which they might want to look at, for other
problems.
so, if we are contemplating adding a link to the toc.html file after the
instructions in the current document, i think that's fine. if we are
contemplating altering the current index.html file in any more significant
way, i still maintain that now is not the time to do it.
thanks,
oliver
