Even though I gain most of the information through the internet, I beleive that there is a fundamental problem with presenting information this way. Sure, a large proportion of content maps perfectly to text & image mediums, but I for one beleive that whenever you are describing some process or other, you should present it in a way that stays coherent as you move on.

Here’s a case in point. I was reading an article regarding the implementation of the Unit of Work pattern with NHibernate. At some point, I realized that the code has lost its internal consistency such that things simply would not compile. This is bad because, from my perspective, it keeps me second-guessing about what the author meant at a particular instance.

So here’s the deal: on the one hand, you want to present the solution in small pieces, but on the other hand, you need to offer people the possibility of viewing the whole thing. So far, this hasn’t been done well by anyone, apart from the boring ‘download source code’ links which aren’t really helpful because by the time you unzip the stuff and open it in Visual Studio, the train of thought is lost.

I beleive that software can and should overcome this problem. We already have teaching systems like Captivate that help us make things more interactive. If only we can somehow make it work with a program like Visual Studio, well, I think it would be really cool.

Meanwhile, I’ll be thinking of how to improve TypograFix to present information better.