This is a good point. You have to have some assumptions of what your audience brings.

I'm aware there are levels of information in an IP packet, but I don't know them offhand. If I have to google something on the first sentence in a high level overview, then I'm likely not going to read the piece and the author has lost me as a reader. Maybe I'm not the target audience, though I was interested. I'm providing that as feedback for the origial author since the piece mentions that's it's still a work in progress.

If only we were using a technology where you could turn the word "L2"[0] into a link to a page explaining what it means.

Then the author wouldn't have to, and we wouldn't need to use a search engine!

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model#Layer_2:_Data_Link_L...

To be fair, L2 could be Layer 2 or Level 2 (cache) and it might be a crapshoot what you get. You might get confused trying to answer your own questions.

Discoverability lives in the space between overexplaining and underexplaining.

In a networking discussion, L2 always means Layer 2. If the subject of caching came up the author would say "I'm talking about L2 cache here."

It's like TTL. It means one thing in a networking context but something totally different in a digital logic context.

But granted, somebody with no networking background wouldn't necessarily know that.

One can just add switch, router, network, etc to the query until it works. Supposedly they'll all work. Weak google fu means no info today, and if OP and the author are not the same person, then the latter may not even have a clue that it was posted on hn, where such high standards apply. If someone brought an electronics forum wiki post, should one expect every TLA¹ to be explained there too?

¹ Three Letter Acronym/Abbreviation

For me, that book was W. Richard Stevens's TCP/IP Illustrated, volumes 1 & 2 particularly.

Surely they would be aware the audience would know what ethernet is. To me, L2 refers to the level 2 cpu cache.