>I am trying to understand why you seem to think such things are important.
>After five years on the net, I have yet to see a need for any other format
>than those commonly in use - i.e. ASCII. Perhaps that is because I personally
>have no need to get fancy - I don't even have a word processor on my XENIX
>machine, _or_ a text processor worth mentioning.
After thirteen years on the net, I too have yet to see a need for any other
format; I do see a need to figure out how to actually get people to read
these things, but that's a social problem that appears to be resistant
to technical solutions. I strongly doubt that standardizing the format,
*however spiffy that might be*, will have the slightest effect;
folks who don't read them in ASCII won't read them in whatever hypertext
cross-referenced GUI-based keyword-searching format anyone takes the
time to put them in.
>: And I know many of you reading this are about
>| to break a vein because you feel so laboured just to have to write
>| FAQ lists that it should be in "whatever damn format I want, who
>| cares if people reading it can't convert it. That's the way *I*
>| want it because I'm writing it."
>| Very sad.
Welcome to the world of volunteerism, where you are entitled to exactly
what you are paying for: anything else that you get is gravy, and should
be treated as such. And you're right: I *don't* care if anyone can
"convert" my FAQ's; I didn't write them so that someone could "convert"
them, I wrote them so that they'd be read by human beings...who seem
to be doing that just fine, thank you. It's sad that you seem to have
lost sight of why these documents exist. (Hint: not for the convenience
of anybody's software.)
Sorry to be so negative, but I'm growing tired of the series of
standard-of-the-week crusades that seem to consist mostly of attempts
to push FAQs into stilted formats in order to support somebody's idea
of the The Right Way to access/archive/search them. (Hint #2: Most
of the information out there is stored as free-form ASCII text. If you'd
really like to do something useful, spend some time trying to figure
out how to cope with *that* rather than trying to get the world to change.)
---Rsk
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