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Re: general discussion

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On Fri, Aug 04, 2000 at 09:15:42PM -0400, hes@unity.ncsu.edu wrote:
>> - How can people without Usenet access contributed ?
>> - How do sites deal with web based versions ?
[...]
> 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 CD-Recordable FAQ is maintained as a plain ASCII text document, and
converted into HTML with a converter. The converter will create a
multi-file version (one HTML file for each major section -- I have 10 in
all) or a single-file version. The table of contents is generated
automatically from the Subject headings, and included at the top of the
single-file version or a separate file for the multi-file version. Also,
for the multi-file version, a single-chapter TOC is generated at the top
of each HTML file.

The multi-file version is good for browsing -- you can see the complete
list of questions on the main page, and it takes very little time to
download -- and the single-file version is good for printing.

For the curious, you can see each version here:

  (html) http://www.fadden.com/cdrfaq/
  (text) ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-group/comp.publish.cdrom.hardware/

The converter (http://www.fadden.com/dl-misc/#faq2html) "knows" more about
the format than the faqs.org converter, so the results don't really look
auto-converted. Contrast with the faqs.org version here:

  (html) http://www.faqs.org/faqs/cdrom/cd-recordable/part1/

I have found a couple of other, unrelated "faq2html" programs on the web
that do similar things. I prefer to maintain it in ASCII because I like
having it as a Usenet FAQ, and because I worry about the ASCII presentation
more than I worry about the HTML.

- Andy

-- 
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