Re: How large should parts of posts be?

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A. Deckers (Alain.Deckers@man.ac.uk)
Sat, 31 May 1997 22:12:11 +0100 (BST)

Michael Dimmick wrote:
>
> I've been looking through the various post-approval guidelines, but can't
> seem to find any advice on how large parts of an FAQ should be.
>
> Basically, my FAQ is a couple of months old and various people have asked
> me to include more details on several things, and it's now about 13K in
> size. It's in minimal digest format.
>
> Does anyone have a rule of thumb to decide how big parts should be?

I think that rather than imposing some arbitrary limit upon individual
part sizes, if possible you should use something that would make sense
to a reader. Divide your FAQ into reasonably self-contained parts
bringing together related items.

For example, I divide the soc.culture.spain FAQ into four parts:

+ Introduction
+ Netiquette
+ Information for Travellers
+ Spanish On-line Resources

These vary in size from approx. 10k to 50k.

Similarly, the Perl FAQ written by Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington
(which I use frequently) is split into nine parts:

+ General Questions About Perl
+ Obtaining and Learning about Perl
+ Programming Tools
+ Data Manipulation
+ Files and Formats
+ Regexps
+ General Perl Language Issues
+ System Interaction
+ Networking

These vary in size from approx 15k to 50k.

HTH,

Alain