How many heading levels are there in your document?¶

Power point has its problems. What you write on a single slide (max six words per line, max six lines) is approximately the same as what I see every night in the kiddy book I read to my two-year old daughter. Ouch. That is a very short summary of what Edward Tufte is saying regarding powerpoint. He's got a nice short book on it. To get an impression, read this short entry.

Tim Bray pointed me to above page, but also to Martin Hardee. He worked on a user interface for a lot of Sun information. Some 16000 pages. But they wanted to have Edward Tufte's expert opinion on the UI. He played with our AnswerBook for about 90 seconds, turned around, and pronounced his review:

Dr Spock's Baby Care is a best-selling owner's manual for the most complicated "product" imaginable - and it only has two levels of headings. You people have 8 levels of hierarchy and I haven't even stopped counting yet. No wonder you think it's complicated.

Ouch. I know I normally put three levels of headings in a reasonably big document. I've feld I had a need for that, in order to make the structure clear. But, granted, you can see that as a lack of clarity in the text itself. I promise myself I'll make a good effort to keep the number of heading levels down to two in my PhD thesis :-)