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Comment by zenoprax | Hacker News Reader

Are they really so close?

The lecture is the explanation. The tutorial/lab is a guided experience (Microsoft's fake Contoso company comes to mind). A how-to guide is what you need when you want to search/chatgpt a solution. Reference material: thesaurus, encyclopedia, owner's manual.

Video games have built-in tutorials and yet walkthrough guides are still necessary for tricky puzzles. You check the key bindings as reference.

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Your videogame example shows the problem. Tutorials are effectively just a different form of walkthrough. You are getting walked through the basics. So that's my point, you can't have different words on your website that is supposed to help people gain understanding and then start off by confusing everyone with words that are all so close in meaning.

The purpose is always the same: To learn. It's how you learn and what your learn for that are different. A tutorial is for getting exposed to something. A guide is for a very specific purpose in something you're already familiar with. An explanation is for a deeper understanding and references are for not relying on memory. They all refer to different things that ultimately falls under the same concept (and intersect with each other). If you're building a system, you should have all of them otherwise, the documentation is lacking.

> "tutorials are just a different form of walkthrough"

Yes, one is focused on understanding (mechanics, lore, UI) and the other is focused on a specific task (do these steps to progress).

Diataxis is not inventing these words - it is using them deliberately. You seem unwilling to actually [learn what they mean](https://chatgpt.com/share/6751d9b7-3fd4-800a-8b81-1949069007...).

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