Monday, November 13, 2017

This Trait of Websites is Known to Bug the Hell Out of Me (Answer "What Is Inconsistency?")

This is why I am driven insane on a regular basis as a technical writer. I see things like this website and wonder if I'm the only person in the world that thinks single sourcing a single short phrase like "report an incident" is a good idea. Here's what I'm talking about.

If I go to a web page and I search for "Report an incident" with the match case parameter set to "Yes," I see 7 matches on this page:


If I search for "Report An incident" with the match case parameter set to "Yes," I see 36 matches on this page:


If I search for "Report an incident" (lowercase "a" in "an") with the match case parameter set to "Yes," I see 43 matches on this page:


This tells me that if I am looking for the phrase "Report an Incident" on this web page, whether I capitalize the "a" in "an" or not will impact my results. I didn't go through all the iterations of capped / not capped, but I did think about them:
  • Report An Incident - all words capped
  • Report An incident - all words capped but incident
  • Report an Incident - all words capped but an
  • Report an incident - all words capped but an and incident
  • report An Incident - all words capped but report
  • report an Incident - all words capped but report and an
  • report an incident - no words capped
If "report an incident" was stored as a snippet and was referred to 43 times in the HTML code, there would be no need for a user to get different results depending upon the case parameter in their search. As a technical writer, small details like this bug the hell out of me!

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