Date:         Mon, 13 Dec 1999 10:47:20 -0500
Reply-To:     "Fehd, Ronald J." <rjf2@CDC.GOV>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         "Fehd, Ronald J." <rjf2@CDC.GOV>
Subject:      Re: sashelp.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

From: Howard Schreier [mailto:Howard_Schreier@ITA.DOC.GOV]
/I too was impressed with the thought and design effort which went into
/the sashelp.com site. It occurred to me that it's what SUGI's presence
/should look like, if one thinks of SUGI as an organization and not just
/as an event.

I did a small review and sent some comments to Mr Ward, re having test
programs and test data included with the macros published.

/A central collection would be wonderful. As far as I know there are no
/legal obstacles, as the publishing rights granted to the conference
/organizations are non-exclusive.

I agree; there are lotsa good round flat things with holes in the center
that the rest of the user community.

/There would be need for good indexing and cataloguing.

I spoke to SI staff at SESUG about an idea that I have:
there needs to be a 'computer-literate word-list' to be used when folks
write documentation and do their indexing. No one arrives at SAS manuals or
on-line help with no prior knowledge of computers or data processing. Things
that we take for granted, because we have used a word-processor or
spreadsheet, or live in the real world, are sometimes maddeningly difficult
to find in SAS documents.

soapbox ON
My pet bitch from my first few years of using V5 manuals was the absence of
the key-word 'page-break' in the index.
See also the key-word 'scope' in early macro documentation. 'Referencing
environment', my ass!
soapbox OFF

factoid: A birdie responded to me that their publishing software requires
some three minutes of active writer time in order to add a word to the
index.

Personally I think we need a dynamic search engine, similar to how
www.google.com works, in order to effectively use such a database.

I recently checked the on-line help for PWREQ: PassWordREQuest and the first
item was for the MDDB engine, which quotes the argument to this option
<PWREQ='YES'>. No quotes required when using this as a SAS data step option
<PWREQ=YES>. My point is not that an option be consistently used -- do we
all remember the QUIT as step-boundary discussion? -- but that the MDDB
engine usage came up at the top of the list of found items. Well,
alphabetizing happens, eh?!

I am willing to work on this project.

Are we talking about bells for the cat,
or money to buy the cat?

Ron Fehd  the collecting maven  CDC Atlanta GA USA