Re: The FAQ system approaches obsolescence. What do we do now?

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David Barr (barr@pop.psu.edu)
Tue, 06 Dec 1994 22:28:28 -0500

In message <ZRqXwc5w165w@berry.Cary.NC.US>, Pat Berry writes:
>Putnam Barber <pbarber@eskimo.com> writes:
>> I use lynx to
>> access the Web all the time and it works just fine. I don't get to see
>> the pretty pictures or hear the sound-effects, but the fundamental
>> vitality of the web for providing access to text-based information is
>> easily available over a dial-up line to a text-oriented unix provider.
>
>Unix is not the entire world.

That's right. There's Lynx for MS-DOS, too.

WWW does not (and in fact never has) implied graphics.

Remember that the WWW's first platform was VM/CMS, which had no
graphics capabilities.

>I access newsgroups with a DOS program
>that downloads my news traffic via dial-up connection to another PC
>running OS/2.

It's possible to access WWW offline, too, via either e-mail or
through a preloaded cache. I'm starting to see sites offer
prepackaged .zip/tar.gz files which have an entire subtree's
files ready to unpack on a local disk. Just download the one file
and unpack it, and point your browser to the first page and whammo.
Offline access.

I don't think anyone's seriously thinking that the WWW will replace
Usenet. That's silly. At the very least WWW will replace anonymous
FTP access to FAQ's. The impact of that alone is a serious thing to
consider.

--Dave

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