Please let me play just a _bit_ of devil's advocate though. I will start
out by re-affirming, as I have mentioned before, that I believe that, for
the most part, existing standards are sufficient - some guidelines, ideas,
whatever to help the first time author are of some interest personally,
but other than that, fine.
On the _other hand_, the point in the above quote that I would like to
counter is this - I _do_ see some benefits in new formats. For example,
standardizing on URL formats could allow news reader software authors
to recognize a particular string pattern and attempt to allow the user to
take some special action. An example of a 'new' (ie less than 10 yrs old)
that I wish more folks would use are Reference lines in news postings - so that
instead of seeing 25 individual news articles when a.b.c FAQ is posted, I would
see one thread . It takes very little effort on the part of the poster
(there is software to take care of it for you for instance) and it makes
the life of all those folks whose news readers support it easier. The
thing that kicked me over the edge was when _I_ benefitted from it - that's
when I did it.
And so it is for any new idea of this sort. Those of you who still don't
have the benefits of WorldWideWeb, Gopher, etc. see no need to benefit those
who have the features. Those of us who don't see a need for fancy printing,
special keywords, etc. won't have a motivation to move our FAQs from plain
ASCII to groff, tex, etc. formatting language. And so on. FAQ authors
will only go to the lengths at which it benefits themselves either directly
or indirectly. So in some ways, the folks who propose new FAQ formats are
not out of line to talk about this on the net - this is how a grass roots
movement can be started - let folks know that things could be better and that
they should volunteer to assist their FAQ writers in converting things. One
of three or so things could happen - the FAQ writer might run right out and
convert (unlikely); they might flame the person royally (quite likely); or
they might at some level ask the volunteer to help - either by taking each
new version and converting it, going thru a one time conversion, or ask them
to just take over the entire FAQ writing.
--Larry W. Virden INET: lvirden@cas.org Personal: 674 Falls Place, Reynoldsburg, OH 43068-1614
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