Here is my summary--please excuse the taking of liberties with the
prose. My question was fairly hypothetical and wasn't strictly meant
to reflect an actual FAQ, but some of the comments have prompted me to
think about revising the DNS Resources Directory
http://www.dns.net/dnsrd/
so that it becomes more of a stand-alone document.
Jim Jewett <jimj@eecs.umich.edu> tackled posting marked up text as is,
and pointed out that the `click <A>here</A>' style of cross-referencing
is bad. However, references of the form `<A HREF=content>container
name</A>' with container names which describe the contents in a
meaningful way _are_ useful and would still be useful even in a raw
HTML document (Elf M. Sternberg <elf@halcyon.com> also mentioned that
the syntax of cross-referencing was important). The intended audience
probably has problems with interpreting markup so posting raw HTML is
not very useful.
Tim Pierce <twpierce@midway.uchicago.edu> took issue with relying on
cross references to capture the semantics of a document, and stated a
prevalent view of hypertext as augmenting but not replacing text; also,
that a hypertext document should still be comprehensible as flat text.
Steve Summit <scs@eskimo.com> gave an example of an FAQ with many
cross-references, that for comp.lang.c, which was written as flat text
and is only being marked up now.
There seems to be a strong consensus that an FAQ is a stand-alone
document that can be represented as flat text. Calling a collection of
references an FAQ is probably not useful. Thanks everyone!
Andr\'as Salamon andras@is.co.za
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