As I said in Re^2: RFC - shortform posting guidance for newcomers (meh), some of us not only don't speak HTML, but don't want to, having no use for it. The higher you raise the HTML bar, the more you will do to drive away people like me, who want to learn Perl but not HTML. However well anything had been formatted, I would not have read and understood it before posting Connecting to MySQL. Once some kind janitor added readmore tags, I saw that what I had done needed changing and what the change was. Since then, I've been able to do it for myself. But trying to work out what HTML is important is still beyond me.

I had similar HTML problems in other early nodes. Re: Perlmonks, money & music was fixed by dvergin after I posted an editor request, not knowing enough even to write an <a> reference. In Re^5: Modifying an existing Excel file, I tried the same method and had the error of my ways pointed out to me. In all these cases I learned something that wasn't in my plan. The reason I learned them was that I could see (or it was clearly explained to me) why what I did originally was inconvenient for those whose help I wanted.

Because the denizens of this site were so tolerant of my blunders, I have learned far more than I would otherwise. Because this approach has worked for me, I think it will work for others. I would not have read Markup in the Monastery before my early posts (did an earlier version exist? This one is dated 2008, well after I joined). I don't understand much of it now - back then, there would have been no chance.

I therefore suggest that tolerance and janitor intervention is going to achieve more than documentation, however well written. And how many of us are professional technical writers? Unless we can cajole or pay for some, it is almost certain that documentation will be lacking in some respects. I think there are better ways to help posters write better nodes than striving for perfect documentation.

Regards,

John Davies

In reply to Re: Do we need to get "in your face" about readmore-tags? by davies
in thread Do we need to get "in your face" about readmore-tags? by locked_user sundialsvc4

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