Talk:Introduction to JP Boyd on Family Law

I would like to see a subsection in the introduction: How the information is organized. (Think about the print readers as well as online readers for this.)

This is as good a place as any to identify important organizational issues about headings and sections:

Cross-referencing right now lists the chapter heading (short form) plus the section. There are no links just to a section.

There are still major challenges:

1. Names of chapters. For some chapters, there is a short title (in the TOC that you can see on the right) and a longer title when you arrive at the destination. This creates uncertainty when you link internally (am I in the right place?) Both for online and print, the name of the chapter should be exactly as it appears in the direction to it. Otherwise readers will feeling anxious. If the short title is Children, then Children it is.

The poses challenges, such as The Legal System is really about family law in particular, not the legal system as a whole. I don't think we can get round it by having short/long titles. We can put something up front saying in the first sentence, "This chapter talks about the legal system in family law matters" . . . or some such.

2. Chapters headings doubling as section headings. At the moment the chapter heading is also de facto the heading of the overview section. This is followed by "more detailed" sections. Logically this bothers me. It should be (a) heading; (b) section/section/section. And in the in-print TOC it will need to look like this.

The problem then becomes a style sheet one, where each section (aka page) starts with an (a) heading, even though subsequent sections are actually (b) section headings. In an online non-book format, I'd take a heading page, put in the intro, then line up the sections for folks to link to: overview section/more detailed section/more detailed section. (The heading for the overview could pick up on the current "long form" of the title, with the word overview at the begining or end.)

3. In-print use of the TOC. The chapters are not alphabetical. They don't right now have numbers (or not that I can see). Readers cannot be expected to form a map of the TOC in their heads. Online they can go over and check where to go, because all that is showing are the short titles and its visually manageable. A print TOC would need to include sections as well and will be quite long.

4. Cross-referencing to the forms is currently quite wild - they have one name in the document and another in the TOC. We need to harmonize this.

In law, a document demonstrating ownership of a thing. See "ownership."