Pattern : FINDABLE SECTIONS
- CONTEXT : You are writing a pattern that is part of a
collection intended to be used as a reference. You have applied
Mandatory Elements Present, Optional Elements When Helpful and
Skippable Sections. You are striving to make the pattern easily
understood and Single-Pass Readable, and usable as reference
material.
- PROBLEM : How do you make it easy to find key elements
of the pattern, most notably the Problem, Context, Forces and
Solutions elements?
- FORCES :
- The information
required to determine whether a pattern is applicable
may be a small subset of the information required to
actually apply the pattern.
- People require
different amounts of information to understand and apply
a pattern.
- People sometimes
only have a limited time to invest in reading a pattern.
- A long-winded
pattern description may cause a reader to skip the
pattern entirely because the expected return does not
justify the investment.
- If a section is
skipped, it may be hard to determine where to restart
reading.
- SOLUTION :
- For your pattern style, determine which sections a reader may be specifically looking for
when using the material as reference.
- Clearly identify the beginnings of each of these sections so that the reader may find
them easily. This can be done typographically (using fonts, underlining, etc), using headings, or graphically (using
diagrams, *'s, etc. between sections).
- Techniques to help find the reader find the start of patterns include starting all
patterns on a new page, shaded headers, and evocative illustrations at the start of patterns.
- RATIONALE: A section is only truly skippable if the next section of interest is easily found without reading or skimming the
section to be skipped. The more visible the section demarcations, the easier it is to skip directly to them.
- RELATED PATTERNS: Skippable Sections focuses on helping the reader read a pattern efficiently while this pattern improves the
usability of the pattern as reference material.
- EXAMPLES : The "Alexandrian" pattern style uses fonts and *** delimited paragraphs to allow the reader to pick out the
problem and solution sections.
