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An interesting article, Bob. Perhaps better documentation would help a few of
the workarounds cited, but it seems to me that most of the article points up
the pitfalls of trying to 'solve' system or software problems with
documentation. Documentation can tell users how good, or bad, something is, but
documentation can't fix a problem. As the article points out, documentation can
only tell you if it's possible to get around a problem that probably should be
fixed (notwithstanding the Gateway Solitaire problem) anyway.
In fact, I think sometimes that documentation is expected to fix things (that
is, to paper over, literally!) that either stump the developers, are too costly
to really fix, "will be fixed in the next release" (if we can ever get that one
rolled out the door), or somebody hopes will go away. I think these various
paradigms explain why some documentation sets get so big. It takes a lot of
documentation to lead users down a convoluted path.
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