Balanone <balanone@bigfoot.com> wrote:
> Tom, your points concerning text are good, but there are reasons why
> an HTML FAQ can be better.
>
> In my case, my FAQ is 53k in size (the REF document is 176k). There
> are people who like reading through a FAQ this large, but most want to
> find specific information. Using HTML href links I'm able to split the
> FAQ into multiple documents by section, and they can *easily* follow
> the links to the appropriate section of the FAQ.
>
> As I'm sure most people can understand in a FAQ this large, there are
> many cross-references within the FAQ. Again, HTML href links allow
> people to easily jump back and forth between related sections.
But these are really delivery-related issues. If I don't have a copy of the
FAQ, and I go hunting on the Web, and I find it *on a web server* and
navigate through the pieces as described above, then yes, it's better for me
as a user because I only have to load small pieces at a time until I find
the section I'm looking for... assuming that it WAS just a section I was
looking for, to answer one question, rather than just wanting to get a copy
locally for future use, or read the whole thing to learn a subject fast, as
we often do. In the latter cases, I'm going to spend the whole download
time anyway, and splitting it up into pieces actually makes more work for
me.
And if someone has MAILED me one or more sections, either manually or in
response to an automated mail server, then the hyperlinking is mostly
useless unless I take the trouble to install a local mirror directory
myself.
Anyways, navigational links *within the FAQ* are not core content, they're
meta-content. Nobody requests your FAQ for the *primary* purpose of
figuring out how to get to subsection 3.8 of your FAQ; they had some
question about the actual subject matter.
> There's also a benefit to graphics. In the section which discusses the
> Pentagram of Set, I'm able to display the pentagram. And graphics of
> Set are useful as well.
Yes, and there are analogous things in almost every discipline, but the
question is whether it's really most appropriate for a FAQ document to try
to CONTAIN relevant graphical resources itself, or whether it should more
properly be POINTING to the sites where people who actually maintain those
resources have the latest versions.
Take something like the Civil War, for example. People are always asking
about Gettsyburg, Cemetery Ridge etc, and there are some answers that work
best with a map. And there are people out there who are constantly
collating, collecting, updating and improving map resources. Should the FAQ
maintainer *circumvent* those people's efforts by embalming some GIF
snapshot of a five year old illustration into the FAQ (increasing its size
and decreasing its portability as a result)? I would prefer that standard
practice be used, and a textual description of the answer be given along
with some links to people with map pages that explain in more detail. That
way when someone improves or corrects their map, your FAQ is still up to
date.
Edward Reid <edward@paleo.org> writes:
> Window dressing can, however, add significantly to readability if used
> well (though that's a BIG IF). The last time I heard, reading speed on
> screen was typically 75% of speed on paper, so readability is a major
> concern.
As I say, I sympathize with wanting to have a good-looking FAQ, I just don't
like making the formatting integral to the core content.
By the way, everything we're talking about could be applied to publishing
your FAQ as an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) file. Readability, printability,
graphics, hyperlinking, it's all there. But I rarely see a PDF FAQ (with
the obvious exception of the Acrobat FAQ itself... point of pride at Adobe I
suppose).
> For a visually impaired person using a non-visual browser, a link which
> includes only the raw link is frustrating (because the browser reads
> the link text aloud to give the user an overview of the links on a
> page).
This is a well known problem in speech browsing, and one which software
authors are working hard to eliminate; it's not clear to me that FAQ
maintainers need to lead the charge on concealing content for the sake of
this problem, but others might disagree. There's certainly virtue in a
"Hide URL's" button if you are presenting via the Web. Once you have
committed to any other delivery mechanism, it's too late. There is a "skip
to next word" button on the speech browsers I have seen, and visually
impaired users hit it with alacrity, not just for URL's but for all kinds of
spelled-out words. My temptation is to let them optimize their thing, while
we optimize our thing, but like I say, others may disagree.
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