Re: My Next Trick

Alex Lopez-Ortiz (alopez-o@barrow.uwaterloo.ca)
Sun, 6 Feb 1994 22:51:52 -0500

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>
>(It seems to me that the *worst* FAQs are the ones that cannot easily
>be `hypertexted', and perhaps I can demonstrate that. Here's why: a
>hypertext document is really nothing but a document where its
>references have been made *explicit* rather than implicit. That is, a
>document might say `experts agree that you should do [x].' a hypertext
>document would say, `experts [a][b][c] agree that you should do [x]. '
>where [a][b][c] are all hypertext buttons that could lead to the actual
>quotes. The documents that *don't* have references to their answers,
>e.g. sort of exist in a vacuum, `handed down from above', in the prior
>form, seem to me to be *poor writing* because of the lack of
>referencing. Existing FAQs that qualify all their statements anyway,
>like `you can get a file on this subject from
>rtfm.mit.edu:/pub/news.answers/writing/resources' are easy to `hyperfy'.)

You miss the point, all documents can be improved with the use of
hypertext; which does not imply that all documents are thus necessarily
a simple collection of pointers. I maintain/author two FAQ's:
alt.drugs.caffeine and sci.math. The former can be easily be thought
of as a set of pointers to "atomic" documents, the latter is a text,
very much like a textbook in which the ability to navigate, although
useful, does not define the structure of the document as a set of
pointers.

By the way I'm currently in the process of hypertexting _both_ FAQ lists
using latex2html.

In the sci.math FAQ I want to include hypertext pointers to all concepts
used which are defined elsewhere in it. But I don't want each and every
occurrence of the word to be underlined because it brings unwanted
attention to it. As far as I know this cannot be done with latex2html.
So this is an example of a situation in which hypertext may not be the
way to go.

Does anybody know if its possible to add an hypertext link without having
latex2html --or html alone for that matter-- underline it?

Alex

-- 
Alex Lopez-Ortiz                             alopez-o@neumann.UWaterloo.ca
Department of Computer Science                      University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario                                                   Canada

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