> 1. My format allows for specific reference sections which can
> be turned into WWW URLs. Example:
Support for the Internet standard of Universal Resource Locators - and
in the future Universal Resource Names - is a valuable thing. But if
you look at an example of a FAQ that has gone thru Fine's filter, you
will see that his formatting filter has support for url's - actually,
in my mind, better support than yours since with his format:
protocol://site:port/path/to/resource one can typically cut and paste
it into a Windows, Mac, Unix, VMS, etc. WWW client if one cannot use the
client to directly view the file in question. See my previous posting
for a URL to my comp.lang.tcl FAQ to see that no compromise in ASCII
readablity was made - in my opinion anyways.
>Last comments:
> If people don't want to use my format, it would make things a whole
> lot easier if they used HIS format instead of their own. I'd
> almost go so far as to request to the moderator that FAQ lists to
> be posted to news.answers MUST follow whatever format gets decided
You have to understand one thing here that you seem to be missing.
No one is forced to post to news.answers. And if someone tried to
impose anything more on news.answer posters than is already being done
(which right now is not too much bother) then all you end up with are more
FAQs not appearing in a common place - defeating the usefulness of
news.answers. So we have no particularly useful benefit, and a particularly
harmful side effect, if one imposes this restriction.
I think that pretty much settles the question for me.
> on. It really does the end readers a lot of good to have the
> FAQ list in a ``common'' format that conversion utilities are
> available for. And I know many of you reading this are about
ASCII is a common format. There are few systems in the universe which
cannot print ASCII. I don't see what your problem is with using ASCII?
Typically one can search ASCII, print it, etc. I really don't see what
benefit it is to create 'pretty-printer' filters for this stuff. I have
found few FAQs that appeared to me to be all that useful to print off and
carry around with me for years anyways. They change on a regular basis, so
one continues killing trees to have an up-to-date copy. If one is going
to use the software for an online lookup, that certainly would at first
blush seem to indicate that perhaps some sort of special format would be
beneficial, but then I see that there are several freely distributable
full text search and retrevial systems, and thus see no need to waste time
writing, supporting, and maintaining doc in special formats to support
some facility when other software is being supported which does not require
me to use special formatting.
--Larry W. Virden INET: lvirden@cas.org Personal: 674 Falls Place, Reynoldsburg, OH 43068-1614
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