I think the "problem" is due to two things - the FAQs on how to write
stuff for news.answers is overlong, and stresses theory over a cookbook/template
approach too much. Secondly, there isn't a single, simple description of
the FAQ digest format. We keep referring to RFC1153, but that "standard"
is considerably more stringent/verbose than is strictly speaking appropriate
for FAQs, and is overkill if what you're trying for is to work with trn (and
other newsreaders) "digest" functionality. And almost nobody is exactly
compliant with RFC1153 anyways - a subset is used that is sufficient for
most newsreaders to recognize. Here am I, the champion of digest format,
and only one of my FAQs is 1153 compliant. But they are all news digest
compliant.
To amplify on digest format - many people, when referred to 1153, or
contemplating converting an existing faq, comment on how long it will take.
It shouldn't - any FAQ that's already following some consistent structure
for Q&A should be convertable to minimal news digest format with trivial
effort. Indeed, most should be fixable with a single command to your
editor. All that news digest format requires is:
Subject: <subject>
starting in column one for each "section" or "Q&A". Since a few of the
existing FAQs are using "Subject" lines in their table of contents too -
Thomas Fine's hypertext converter tries to be a little smarter, and needs
either a blank line or a line of hyphens on the previous line to trigger
on "Subject".
[Note to that person complaining "and who'd want FAQs exploded into multiple
random articles anyways?". The answer is: NN digest functionality is busted.
The other newsreaders (and add-on undigestifiers such as "undig") just give
you a method to skip to the next section, some with trivial extensions
to save or reply to individual sections.]
I think we should get away from the bits and bolts of theory, and stress
cookbook and "tool" solutions more. For example, if you have to spend a
couple of paragraphs on how to manually use Expires: properly, that's too
much for an introductory document. If there's a tool to do it, great - tell 'em
about that, but don't carry on about RFC whatever this and RFC whatever that
just on how to set Expires properly.
} OK, let me brainstorm a bit about a more general *solution*. Let's create
} a multiple-part posting, or set of files, or something, that are
} _suggested_ templates for new FAQ writers; and _multiple_ ones, to appeal
} to posters at various levels of net.expertise. These templates should
} be accompanied by explanations of _why_ the various features are there.
} Basicallly, a complete set of "How to write FAQs" guides.
I like your idea. But I'd simplify it even further to the following
three levels in "FAQness":
1) How to post an ad-hoc FAQ (get into your posting software, select
the right groups, tack on your prepared text, and let fly.
Whenever seems appropriate)
2) How to "register" with news.answers and the minimum header
standards (Archive-name: etc), and how to get the posting
tools - which will solve Expires, References everything else
automatically. While I know postfaq isn't ideal for this, since
it presupposes Perl, I believe that there's also a fairly full
functionality auto-faq poster written in shell which will be
in all practicality, more portable. The alternate, no-tools
approach would be to register with jik's poster server, which
will do all the hard work for you. All you need do is mail
the skeleton to the server, and the server handles all the automated
Expires/References/posting interval etc. crap.
3) Suggested FAQ formats.
Follow-on to (3), I think it would be important to document exactly what
we mean by "digest format", for it certainly ain't full RFC1153.
} (p.s. yes, I'm willing to volunteer to be on the team on this, sigh)
Me too. For starters, I'm going to write a "Digests: A Suggested Format
for FAQs", which will simply document the digest "Subject:" format
convention, and add FTP/other FAQ/email address tags. It'll be *really*
short - shorter than this mail message, because one of the purposes is
to show how simple it is. I'll mail it here for people's perusal in the
next couple of days. It'll be valuable for those people considering
conversion. But I think I just talked myself into maintaining another
FAQ ;-)
I hereby solicit suggestions, by direct email to me, for FTP/other FAQ/email
address tag formats. Existing formats are greatly to be preferred. I
kinda like:
<email address in reachable-from-the-internet format>
Like:
<clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca>
or:
<clewis%ecicrl@uunet.ca>
[Yeah, I know that the latter isn't RFC822, but it is mostly useable from
the Internet]
for email. Alternate suggestions?
We could extend this into doing *bold* and _underline_ if people want
to get fancy, but I think we'd have to insert headers saying whether these
tags are to be respected or not - so as not to trip over source code and
such stuff. So I'll leave that out for the moment.
-- Look on the bright side - at least the PC's reached gender parity!Chris Lewis; clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca; Phone: Canada 613 832-0541 Ferret list: ferret-request@ferret.ocunix.on.ca
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