Talk:Waterproof/breathable fabric

I'm not sure that it was a good idea to move from Waterproof fabric → Waterproof/breathable fabric

In principle it was a reasonable change, since the previous article was minimal and only linked from Gore-Tex. However, there are really many fabrics that are Waterproof without being Breathable &mdash; the original Mackintosh for example.

There is also a mild problem with naming, Google searches suggest that there is no consistent choice between and probably some completly different word choices. Although I haven't managed to construct a Google search that correctly differentiates between them to give the relative frequencies.
 * Waterproof/breathable fabric
 * Waterproof-breathable fabric
 * Waterproof breathable fabric

I would suggest moving the article back to Waterproof fabric and expanding the article to cover all varieties of waterproof fabric, with the Waterproof-breathable fabrics being a section. -- Solipsist 07:56, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

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Ok. I see that the waterproof fabric entry is valid on its own, and perhaps should not simply be a redirect. The reason why I changed it was because the original waterproof fabric article was referenced by the Gore-Tex page only, and Gore-Tex is a waterproof/breathable fabric. I made waterproof fabric a redirect because I thought more than one person might use 'waterproof fabric' when they meant 'waterproof/breathable fabric' and I didn't really think about waterproof-and-not-breathable fabrics, figuring that they counted as 'rubberised fabrics' or something like that.

Having thought about it, you're probably right about going back to waterproof fabric, and just making the Gore-Tex article link to the section on waterproof/breathables.

As for the naming, I couldn't find any indication that one version was any more frequent than any other, so I just went with the one that looked most fun. I'll add a note in the original saying that there are these alternate spellings. If you do figure out how to make Google differentiate between "waterproof breathable" and "waterproof-breathable", please put some statistics up on their use, and also I'd love to know how you did it, because it would make searching for really specific things on Google way easier.

-- Frekja 09:47, 11 November 2005 (UTC)