Remove Theming without code, and Understanding CSS page from Theming guide

Emperor Joseph II: My dear young man, don't take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.
Mozart: Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?

@arianek - I'm glad you understand where I'm coming from regarding how many levels. I also agree that it's probably not very good to make longer pages, as usability studies
show that people pay the most attention to the first parts of a page (and then skim the
rest very quickly mostly looking on the left part of the remainder of the page) [Yahoo
Style Guide, St. Martin's Griffin 2010].

@aspilicious - I kinda favor your idea of making separate pages, rather than the links thing.

I have to step back and sort of see what are the problems we are trying to solve here. I think the big picture is to create a useful Theming Guide.

Here are possible problems we are trying to solve:
1. Big pages are not that good in an on-line document
2. Keep existing links so nothing gets broken
3. Give readers access to the information they need quickly.

Let me tell you a story about a user who came to the Theming Guide. He knew before starting that there was some way of creating your own themes, maybe with writing some CSS or maybe some HTML to make a page the way he like it. So he started reading the theming guide. He then read the next 15 pages, in sequence, and and saw a few things that weren't really introduced like .tpl.php files and .info files but had no idea of where or how to use this information, because nobody told him to create a directory in /sites/all/themes.

So he bought a book on theming. And he read some web sites on theming. In the book, it showed a directory structure of the existing garland theme, and until he saw that in a book, he didn't really know there was a separate place for theme files, nor did he know to create his own directory. He thought, why isn't this in the on-line theme guide?

He then read about taking an existing html file, from a html coder/graphics designer which has all the regions where you designed it, and looks perfect and how very trivial it was to convert this to a theme. He thought, "Why isn't something like this in the theming guide?"

And he saw a web site that taught him he could just copy files to his own directory to create his own theme.

Then he looked at the theming guide again after reading about 600 pages in 3 books, and realized, yup, the information is probably in there somewhere, but it's so difficult to find that he couldn't be bothered.

Of course that was me. Can't we make a guide that's as good as a book?

Now here's my vision. The theming guide could benefit from the above ideas and I hope that slowly it will morph into that vision. It will also morph into a guide where information can be found.

But ya gotta let go of some of the fluff. Fluff is any writing that prevents a user from getting to the information she needs to get her job done.

Now a little bit of introductory material is necessary before throwing someone into theming. Telling them what CSS is probably not necessary because they wouldn't be reading a theming guide if they have never thought about CSS. Telling them that your own theme exists in its own directory rather than modifying the core files is necessary. And that you can create a sub-theme simply by doing the following two steps [omitted] is probably necessary. And you can create your own theme simply by creating a directory, an info file and a php file (which is basically a HTML file) is necessary as introductory material.

Introducing CSS is not. Your users already know CSS, or at least know how to learn it.

I think this guide can be transformed into a readable, and navigable document. I chose to start at the beginning, making small changes to it from start to finish. This requires moving things around, improving navigation, and pruning. I know that links will be broken. But the flow of the guide from start to finish is very important. And it's important to get the user to read beyond say page 6 or 7. The way to do this is to make it flow nicely, and to show them in the TOC where they are and what else is there.

Navigate from page 1 sequentially. The page "Overview of theme files" is the 8th page. (Seven clicks before the good stuff). That's the first page where there is real information, and not just introductory information. I think it'd be nice if the pages before this one only contain introductory material, stating in a general way what can be done. And in the future, if I can find out how to do it nicely, I'd like the "about theming" page removed too. It's fluff.

The page "Theming options: beginner, intermediate, advanced" is such an introductory page. It shouldn't be separated too much into separate pages because a user is not likely to get much help from say, going to the advanced page, because it is just an introductory section to advanced topics. It doesn't contain the advanced material itself; that is later in the guide.

I know there's a lot of info in the guide before I ever started, that I seemingly naively want to chop out. This is for a reason.

As an example, a user my come to the guide knowing one of the following
1. I think there's some way to use my own style sheet to make my site look like mine
2. I think there's some way of writing maybe some HTML to maybe make a page look the way I want it
3. I think there's some way of using an existing theme and making a few modifications to it so that it looks like the way I want it.

But HOW?

It should be easy to find this information.

Ok, off the soapbox now, here's my proposal. Yup the beginner intermediate, advanced is too long. I can move the beginner part to the page that is titled "theming w/o code". But the CSS page has to go. 10-15 page clicks before I even have a basic idea of what is involved in creating my own theme is not acceptable.