In message <38F41C7B.BB23D8FC@cyberport.com>
Warren Young <tangent@cyberport.com> wrote:
[snip]
> > > If your FAQ is like mine, though, it doesn't much matter: I post only a
> > > summary to Usenet, which points to my web pages. The summary contains
> > > a basic "what this post is about" intro, a recent change history, and
> > > the FAQ's table of contents. It's only about 200 lines.
> >
> > Do you provide any alternatives, though? FTP? A mailer daemon? I ask this
> > because some people (admittedly not very many, these days) don't have web
> > access...
>
> My FAQ is for Windows network programmers. Surely they are in the top
> 1% of the current Internet population?
Ah, that alters the case a bit - your FAQ is for a fairly restricted target
audience, all of whom probably have the access required.
Nevertheless, I'd shrink from two things, firstly restricting access to any
FAQ, and secondly from defining Windows users as the top 1% of the current
internet population :)
> Anyway, my FAQ works with Lynx. You don't even need PPP access for
> that, just a shell account somewhere on a machine that can run Lynx.
> That rules out who? The remaining 500 people stuck behind a UUCP
> gateway?
As Henk Penning said, there /are/ still many people who don't have the
level of internet technology available to the rest of us - particularly
people in developing countries; and I'm sure there are more than 500
people still behind UUCP...
> I've maintained this FAQ now for about two and a half years. Not a
> single request has come in asking for the FAQ in some pure-text form.
I gave some thought to this, and eventually decided some months ago to
maintain the raw form of my FAQs as LaTeX source, which can be compiled
to just about any format under the sun.
This way, I could (haven't yet, but possibly...) set up a mailer daemon
which could take the request, see what format was wanted and compile the
source to the appropriate format.
Nick
-- God is dead. But fifty thousand social workers have risen to take his place. -- Dr J.D. McCloughley, in "The Bulletin", 1974
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Aug 05 2000 - 12:25:37 CDT