WEB/TXT?
Most of you agree that the FAQs must be available in ASCII at all times.
Web-pages offer a lot more functionality though, and my FAQs are 1. received
automatically by subscribers to 'my' mailing list *and* 2. retrieved from my
website. We got to divide the public by the type of hardware and software
available, factors of importance are: account type (modem?), browser and
printertype.
What you would do yourself in getting some FAQ? In many cases you would get
it from a newsgroup, and store it on your harddisk, and then read it
*offline*. That's where the ASCII comes in fine. In this way, it's available
for the largest public.
But while reading, you get interested in a certain topic, and wouldn't it be
nice if some clickable links were present in that interesting paragraph? You
happen to have a browser (and many people have nowadays!, also those
involved in newsgroups discussions:). So I think a good point was made that
URLs should be put in the text version as well, giving a perhaps somewhat
awkward HTML master document like
<a href="http://your.url">your.url</a>.
If you would like to print the document you could of course print the ASCII
version (good for the matrix printer, many people have one at home). But if
you've got a laserprinter available, you would of course prefer either the
Postscript or the HTML version, depending on if you got a browser or not.
Let's be fair in this: would there be many guys and girls who *have* a
laserprinter (in the office), *don't have* a browser, and are *not
satisfied* with the text version they've just printed? How much would the
need for Postscript be? I'm leaning towards a "not much", a web-form gives a
nice printout after all.
ERGO
I think I'll leave the wordprocessor format (just did that conversion :( and
try maintaining the FAQs in an HTML-editor. I go for the full URLs to show
up in both the text and the web-version, as we are not all on a 7-bit 1200
bps UUCP connection :) If the master-page is ready I could run them through
2 stripping-utilities, that end up with 1. a text version and 2. a
web-version. The <html-codes> can be filtered out pretty easily, as many of
you have shown. User-codes like #text# can put in text or __line-art I would
like to show up in the text-version only. This sounds very feasible to me.
Thanks again for your valuable experience,
(and wanting to share it with me :)
Lars.
-- Lars Idema <idema@dds.nl>
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