> > (FYI, I'm the author of Helldiver which
> > was mentioned earlier in the thread).
>
> Kudos are emitted in your direction. Seriously. I haven't used Helldiver, but
> I've heard good things about it. It has a rep as a clever and well-crafted
> piece of software.
... which is now 3 years old and becoming increasingly clunky by today's
standards. But don't tell my users that. :-)
> 2) Newsreaders that can detect HTML anchors and shell out to a Web browser.
This is probably the approach I'll be taking in future. Using the right
tool for the job and all that. Eventually, I may bring some of the anchor
support down into the newsreader as a fancier way of handling MIME
external bodies. If this mailing list designed a standard way for
referring to FAQ's by their URL/URN, that would be one of the first things
to go in. The other approaches are equally valid; just not my cup of tea.
To talk tech rather than generalities, maybe we can extend the auxillary
header of FAQ's. For example, to use the UUCP internals FAQ again (sorry
for picking on you Ian if you're watching :-) ):
Archive-name: uucp-internals
Version: $Revision: 1.26 $
Last-modified: $Date: 1994/10/26 02:39:07 $
Longer-Version-At: <URL:http://airs.com/uucp-internals-long.html>
Longer-Version-At: <URL:ftp://airs.com/pub/uucp-internals-long.txt>
The normal FAQ posting would be a shorter summary, probably including a
natural language description of "where to get the full thing" for those
without smart newsreaders. Smart newsreaders could detect the
"Longer-Version-At" field and fire off some kind of request for the rest
if the user wants it. Maybe even through a ftpmail or httpmail gateway for
those without IP links.
The name "Longer-Version-At" is negotiable. It was the first thing that
popped into my head. The "<URL:...>" notation is for some of the newer
newsreaders that will probably have support for that semi-standard but
won't know about "Longer-Version-At".
Thoughts?
Cheers,
Rhys.
P.S. I made up the URL's above. Any similarity to the real HTTP/FTP location
of the FAQ is purely coincidental.
-- Rhys Weatherley, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. E-mail: rhys@fit.qut.edu.au "net.maturity is knowing when NOT to followup"
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