| [ ... ]
| In this post, I enumerate the issues involved and summarize the proposals made
| so far (insofar as I can recall them all :-)). Due credit to Rhys Weatherly
| for proposing (in his note of December 8 1994) the general idea of a FAQ header
| specifically intended for a URL link, with the semantics that the HTML target
| of the link is a longer or cureent version of the FAQ posting.
|
| Since Rhys's original proposal, there have been several suggestions for
| different names for the header. Each reflects a slightly different take on
| the link semantics. Some other issues, including readability by humans have
| been raised.
Two months ago I proposed on this list the usage of an Url:-line in the
auxiliary header in a news.answers posting so that a faq-author can 'bless'
some non-usenet version of the posting. I had noticed that an increasing
number of authors were doing it, in slightly different ways.
There was not much discussion and I think it will make it into the
news-answers/guidelines.
We are currently updating our WWW news-answers archive so that
Url:-lines in news-answers posting are clickable.
The archive is in http://www.cs.ruu.nl/cgi-bin/faqwais.
Only the stuff retrieved via wais in html'ized (and clickable).
We are working on a html index (as available in the ftp-archive).
| I see four substantive issues:
|
| 1) Is the semantics of the link to be "point to *current* version of"? Or
| "point to *longer* version of?". Or "point to *authoritative* version of"?
| Or something else?
News.answers postings are very diverse in nature.
It is VERY important to have as little rules as possible.
Let the author point to any off-usenet piece of info.
If it is html, the author can further point to long-versions,
short-version, update-forms, more than anybody can imagine.
Let's just have an Url:-line for this.
| 2) Should the header be specifically a URL/URN link or a general
| link-to-other-resource header that can take a news article ID?
My feeling is that we should have separate mechanisms for pointers
usenet-posting -> off-usenet info (www-info) and
usenet-posting -> other usenet-posting.
| Eric S. Raymond <esr@locke.ccil.org>
-- Henk P. Penning, Dept of Computer Science, Utrecht University \__/ \__/ \ Padualaan 14, P.O. Box 80.089, 3508 TB Utrecht, The Netherlands. \__/ \__/ Telephone: +31-30-534106, fax: 513791, NIC-handle: HPP1 \__/ \__/ \__/ \ Maintainer of ftp://ftp.cs.ruu.nl/pub/NEWS.ANSWERS/ \__/ \__/ \__/ \__/
[
Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive |
Search Mail Archive |
Authors |
Usenet
]
[
1993 |
1994 |
1995 |
1996 |
1997
]
© Copyright The Landfield Group, 1997
All rights reserved