> There are two drawbacks to this. One, of course, is that not everybody has
> the Web yet. This doesn't concern me, as I think the tend towards WWW for
> everybody on the Net is such that it will achieve universality in no more than
> a year from now, and my money is on six months or less from now. Anyone want
> to bet the price of a good dinner against that? No? I didn't think so.
I'd take that bet (if the overhead of currency conversions didn't make
collecting fairly pointless). I suspect you're judging the whole Net by
your own experience. I don't know if you pay for your connection or get
it free with your job/university/whatever, but you're obviously on either
a free connection or a relatively cheap one if you can use WWW routinely.
The number of people with Net access is expanding exponentially -- but
the number with *free* Net access is not. Apart from the special case of
students who get it with their tuition (a fairly steady-state population),
most of the new users these days seem to be going through one of the
increasing number of commercial services.
I don't know what sort of charging policy is typical of US services, but
I'd bet that the majority either already charge by the byte or soon will.
Here in New Zealand, *everyone* pays a minimum of about $8.50/MB to the
national backbone (plus whatever margin your local service adds) for
everything except Usenet news. WWW shifts a lot of bytes around; it's an
expensive toy, not something you can use on a regular basis.
Certainly *some* sort of global-hypertext system will pretty much take
over the Net eventually; I've got no argument with that. But it won't be
WWW, at least not without major changes to make it more efficient. WWW in
its present form is an artifact of free Net access, and will fade along
with it into academic corners. "Eventually" is probably much further off
than Eric thinks (my guess is 3-5 years).
> 1. When should I convert to WWW? (not "Should I" but "When should I")
Beats me. I have no immediate plans to convert my FAQ.
> 2. How long after conversion should I maintain a parallel FAQ form?
Forever; there will always be a place for plain text documents. How long
should you maintain the WWW form? Until something better comes along.
> 3. How, in a WWW universe, can I recapture the useful properties
> of the FAQ format, distribution modes, and archiving?
>
> 4. What, if anything, is the function of rtfm and worthies like
> jik and tale in a world where the "rendezvous database" is
> mostly pointers to WWW documents?
Perhaps they could gently remind the WWW fanatics that this isn't a "WWW
universe" yet?
... Ross Smith (Wellington, New Zealand) <alien@meanmach.actrix.gen.nz> ...
Keeper of the FAQ for rec.aviation.military
"I inspected the man closely -- he was the nearest thing I'd seen to a
human being, without actually being one." (Ned Seagoon)
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