> At 10:15 AM 1/27/97 -0500, you wrote:
>
> >I used to maintain an ASCII *and* HTML versions and imagine the pain of
> >updating both versions. One day I realized I could just save the HTML as
> >ASCII and be done with it. :)
>
> god i used to do this, but i recently switched to just ASCII. would you
> guys say this was a wise thing? most of my audience is on the web, if that
> matters in your recommendation.
Well, personally, I like the idea of making available multiple formats.
There have been some complaints from people who go on the web to find
my FAQ (http://www.nyx.net/~snorwood/faq.html, if anyone cares), only
to get it in plaintext, four-part ASCII, with no internal references.
On the other hand, I feel _very_ strongly that if a FAQ must be available
in any single format, it _must_ be plain ASCII. Certainly for USENET
FAQs, this is critical, for otherwise it would be very inappropriate
to post anything in HTML (contrary to the beliefs of Netscape and
Microsoft, who intend to make USENET into something that it's not...
see the thread in news.admin.net-abuse.misc on HTML posting, for
more info.). There are lots of folks out there (admittedly, they're
in the minority) who only get news and mail through UUCP connections.
They can FTP via several FTP-mail gateways, and for certain purposes,
this method is perfectly acceptable. These folks can't browse the
web in real time (they don't have actual Internet connections), and
so USENET and FTP are their only means for accessing FAQs and other
files.
It's definately an important question, as the Internet and USENET
(which are not the same thing) become more refined. We certainly want
to make use of the latest advances in order to make our documents
as useful as possible, yet we don't want to shut out users of UUCP
or Lynx (my preferred browser, BTW), or text-only 'net access.
-- Scott
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