Some very good questions were raised:
>... With the brave new world of point
>and click access to the Internet, textual copies of faqs, posted to a
>*.answers newsgroup are not reaching as many as would be expected.
>
> - How can people without Usenet access contributed ?
> - How do sites deal with web based versions ?
From the beginning of our FAQ (for alt.locksmithing) we have
maintained the "master" copy as an HTML document and made it available
on the Web (now at http://www.indra.com/archives/alt-locksmithing/) as
well as posting it.
It is really easy to get a good text version from the html by use of
the "lynx" text browser's -dump capability. It is good enough to form
the body of my post with no modifications - but I do go in at the end
and remove some double spacing which it inserts in a list of names.
What lynx does is to solve the problem of handling links - it numbers
them and puts them in a numbered list at the end. So I don't need to
put in both the anchor and the text of the URL at each URL.
> - Does the current static question/answer format solve
> the needs today ?
I don't think so. When people are vitally interested in something,
they just might read through a 1000+ line FAQ, but I don't think that
most people will do that. In our FAQ we tried to made it a bit easier
by listing all the Questions at the beginning, and then answering them
in order (this is common practice) but I've often wondered if there is a
better way.
> - Can natural language questions be asked and the proper responses
> be delivered ?
This might be a better way. But I don't know much about the state of
the art.
-- --henry schaffer > ...
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