Reaction for: OMT Explainer: Dynamic Help for a Graphical Language by Lucas

I hate to give Micro$oft credit for anything, but the author's notion of hypertext explanations is a convention that has been widely used for quite a while in Windows '95 help files. I find them extremely helpful, since they assume basically nothing in the way of prior knowledge, and explain everything, from basic terms to the more complex.

The cool thing about this idea is that the user can get as much or as little information as they want, and don't have to sift through paragraphs of irrelevant or alreay understood text. Although possibly time-consuming to implement, I find hypertext-style help files more often useful than not.

(btw: if anyone is interested in seeing the demo that couldn't find it, I tracked it down. It's at http://nwv.www.media.mit.edu/people/nwv/projects/omt-explainer/.)


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