CommonQuestions

[Francis Giannaros]

Hi,

I think there are many positive changes in the current restructuring of the 
page, but I think there are some problems, too; the only real outstanding one 
is the structure of the table of contents. 

The two structures:
current: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CommonQuestions
old: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CommonQuestions?action=recall&rev=20

Now, while I think the actual *organisation* is better (i.e. Installation, 
Using Ubuntu etc), I don't think it's a good idea to merely have those 
sections in the table of contents. This structure would indeed work very well 
if each section contained one or two points, but on a larger page with many 
questions, it's cumbersome to the reader. 

The reader has to articulate what section his question might be in, then -- 
once he's gone to his current section -- he has to look through each 
sub-heading (differentiating it from the text), and then keep looking to find 
the one he sees. 

While that's troublesome in itself (since the reader has to scroll down 
through pages to find the text), reading large text takes longer. If all the 
points were each individually listed in the table of contents, then it 
becomes quite a bit easier to quickly articulate the point you're looking 
for. 

Note that many questions in the table of contents itself isn't a negative 
idea, as long as it's appropriately organised. 

I didn't get a notification for the changes on that page (probably because of 
the move to h.u.c) and in fact the only way I realised that the layout was 
different was when two users in IRC, today, said that they "couldn't find the 
question", when I told them the answer was in the FAQ (regarding multimedia 
codecs). This only happened once in the past before.

To a somewhat lesser extent, this method also has the advantage of being able 
to say "check point 2.4 in the FAQ", since they're clearly numbered.

Kind thoughts,
Francis Giannaros.

p.s. really, is there no way to make automatically generated anchor tags a 
little more friendly? I just don't see any reason for something like 
#head-0d871c9a0181db4293f4f8d6aa34b4b3b20cb21b
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