1. A recognized way to identify section headers.
2. A recognized way to give pointers to other resources (files available by
FTP, other FAQs, Gopher holes, you name it).
If reader software can identify these constructs in a file, then it will
be able to do most of what is worth doing. And standardizing just these
two points would be a relatively painless thing for most FAQ authors to
handle.
For item 1, I'd be in favor of some very simple and visually unobtrusive
definition like "a line beginning with a section number that is preceded and
followed by at least one blank line". (This assumes that sections are
numbered, of course. The exact syntax of a section number would need to be
agreed on --- Tom Fine's conventions look OK to me.) Or we could use the
message-digest conventions; they are clunkier, but they do have the advantage
that existing software can already handle them.
For item 2, I'd want to be able to write FTP pointers roughly like this:
See site.name:/path/to/file for more information.
(where ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ is the machine-recognized link).
The WWW link conventions are a little more visually jarring than this,
but they are also more general (they handle non-FTP pointers), so I'd be
willing to put up with WWW link notation. Are there any other existing
notations that we should consider? (Is HTML the same as WWW?)
Can anyone think of other facilities that are as fundamental as these two?
I don't think there are any, but perhaps I've missed something.
my $0.02 worth,
tom lane
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