I thought I would switch to e-mail as we have pretty much done this to
death on the FAQ-maintainers list.
>> WEB/TXT?
...
>> 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.
Many HTML FAQs, mine included, contain not just links to external
documents, but also links to leap around within the document. Things
like a "live" contents page. People reading offline can also benfit
from the HTML version.
...
>> 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.
Obviously, I disagree. My FAQ is a non-computer related topic and
many comments have come from people who have been passed a paper copy.
I therefore feel justified in spending time producing the PostScript
version, and hence the paper copy, that I would want people to have.
If you disagree, so be it.
>> 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.
It had not occured to me to strip out the explicit URLs from the WWW
version, ie to strip it in two different ways. I guess I will do
this with the next version.
Regards,
Martin
E-mail: mleese@omg.unb.ca
WWW: http://www.omg.unb.ca/~mleese/
______________________________________________________________________
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Read the Ambisonic Surround Sound FAQ. Version 2.7 now on my WWW page.
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