>Please let me play just a _bit_ of devil's advocate though. [...]
>
>An example of a 'new' (ie less than 10 yrs old)
>that I wish more folks would use are Reference lines in news postings [...]
An excellent point; and I'd like to take it a step further by pointing out
that this feature has been around -- with reader software to support its use --
for about a decade...but folks still have difficulty exploiting it in
order to make the readers' lives easier. The same can be said for other
header features ("Summary", "Keywords", "Followup-to"). The human problems
in educating folks as to the existence and use of these long-standing,
relatively simple features give a clue as to how hard it will be to
get them to use the more advanced features that we're not even sure
we want to support yet.
>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.
Hmmm, a good point and one that I'll have to mull over for a while. But
I would like to extend your last sentence by adding "...or their intended
audience". While I use gopher, wais, and other nifty services, and while
I have a knowledge of 'roff and other markup languages, it's not clear to
me that (a) any of these really matter, because much of the information
that is being disseminated is not enriched by use of those services/markups,
and (b) any one (or more) of these is going to emerge as something approaching
an Internet de facto standard. At this point, I'm content to watch and wait;
this doesn't mean that I'm not interested, but it does mean that I'm not
inclined to spend a lot of time and effort attempting to conform to a
"standard" that may be rather ephemeral.
---Rsk
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