Re: Including Internet addresses in FAQs

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lee@sq.com
Mon, 18 Jul 94 13:26:59 EDT

I have quite a few IP addresses in my list of Metafont fonts;
people generally mail me when they change, and it's not much hassle --
maybe one change every month or two. Usually an IP address changes
at the same time as the site name, so I'd have had to edit the file anyway.

For people without access to name servers it's a big win, and enough
systems come not set up for dns, and/or with an unconfigured nslookup,
that I've continued the practice. When I've omitted the numbers, I've
occasionally had mail from people unable to find the site as a result.

On the other hand, it does depend heavily on the kind of user community you
have, and on the subject of the FAQ. Notes about TeX are read by people
who aren't network savvy. The X Windows (XView, OPEN LOOK UI) FAQs I
keep don't have the same problem at all, and I don' tput the IP numbers
there. By the time people are ftp'ing X11 source code, they are generally
already fairly `net-literate', as you have to know at least a little even
to get started with many X set-ups.

So I'd vote strongly for a resounding `it depends' :-)

Lee

-- 
Liam Quin, Manager of Contracting, SoftQuad Inc +1 416 239 4801 lee@sq.com
HexSweeper NeWS game;OPEN LOOK/XView/mf-fonts FAQs;lq-text unix text retrieval
HTML: SoftQuad HoTMetaL: ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu:web/contrib/SoftQuad, and also
doc.ic.ac.uk:packages/WWW/ncsa/..., gatekeeper.dec.com:net/infosys/...

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