Talk:List of Administrator Processes

From Mac Guides

We should probably agree on a standard for this, HM, since this probably isn't the only list of it's kind. Do we:

1. Have any existing lists that need to be formatted like this list
2. Think of any new lists that would conceivably come up, such as list of replacement RAM manufacturers, lists of RTS games for the Mac, etc...

(PS, the "table" format works for me. It doesn't work better than word:def (in this case) but let's stick with it) --Mainstreetmark 09:30, 28 December 2005 (EST)

As a rough guideline, I tend to format articles as follows:

• If listing items without descriptions (ie one column), or if only a few of the items have descriptions, use a list (eg Menu Extras)
• If listing items with short descriptions and/or other information (ie multiple columns), use a table (eg this article, Keyboard shortcuts, Computing Units)
• If listing items with long descriptions and/or other information, use subheadings (eg System Preferences, Web Browsers for the Mac)

After having a quick look around, Terminal (Commands section) was the only article I could find that may need reformatting. --HexMonkey 19:17, 28 December 2005 (EST)

Ah - no use for you with the word:definition format then? I quite like that one. Perhaps you should consider them for "listing items with long descriptions". --Mainstreetmark 20:51, 28 December 2005 (EST)

I don't dislike the word:definition format, but I think the guidelines I listed above cover most lists. For items with longer descriptions I think subheadings are better, since you can directly link to them from other pages (eg Accounts pane of System Preferences) and they are shown in the table of contents. Perhaps the word:definition format would be suitable to fill the gap between tables and subheadings, ie if the description is so long that it wouldn't look good in a table, but too short to deserve a subheading. --HexMonkey 21:38, 28 December 2005 (EST)

Agreed. Perhaps I might suggest that the word:def format be used for 2-column tables of limited elaboration. SysPrefs is clearly more suited to subheadings (even independent pages, in the future). Tables work well with items with 1 or 2 line elaborations (and obviously multicolumn instances, like that Kilobyte table). A Table on this article may currently be overformating, simply because it lacks defs for all items (leading to lots of empty cells, and therefore, wasted layout space). --Mainstreetmark

I've made some additions to the style guide about lists. What do you think?

The problem I have with using the word:definition format with short descriptions is that it's effectively using twice as much space as it needs to, since there is room to fit both name and description on the same line. Tables, even with a few empty cells, are usually more space efficient since they have multiple pieces of information on one line. For longer descriptions, however, the word:definition format is useful because it makes the name stand out and a smaller percentage of space is wasted.

As for this page, I'd thought about the problem of a lot of empty descriptions when converting it to a table, but since the end goal is to have descriptions for all processes, it shouldn't be a problem. Currently only about a quarter of the processes lack descriptions. --HexMonkey 00:32, 29 December 2005 (EST)