On Sun, Aug 06, 2000 at 05:58:29PM -0400, Tom Neff wrote:
> Tom Holub wrote:
> > At the risk of incurring the Wrath of Curmudgeons, this loss of
> > information is why I decided to keep my FAQ's in HTML format only, and
> > post them that way. If people want to lynx -dump them, let them
> > remove the information themselves.
>
> At the risk of incurring the Wrath Of People Who Attempt To Fend Off
> Sensible And Easily Anticipated Objections By Labelling Those Who Raise Them
> Curmudgeons :) let me suggest in return that with a few very specialized
> exceptions, it is difficult to imagine any subject oriented FAQ that
> actually requires HTML in order to express its contents usefully.
A newspaper doesn't "require" different typefaces and formatting to
"express its contents usefully", but every newspaper uses them.
Formatting allows you to increase the information density while
improving readability. Hyper-links do an even better job of this.
> Certainly most of the B/STRONG/EM/IMG/FONT sorts of tags are just window
> dressing that don't add anything to the information a FAQ imparts.
This is just silly; certainly if you define your parameters such that
the only "important" information is information that can easily be
transmitted by plain text, plain text is fine. I could just as easily
say that punctiuation "doesn't add anything to the information a sentence
imparts", since a comma is "meta-information" about the sentence, rather
than direct information about the subject.
Bold, italic and underline provide useful information--"This is a
subject heading", "this word is emphasized", "this is a book title"--
in a compact form which people already know how to read, since they
are used in every form of textual material.
> As for HREF's, it is true that most FAQs these days need to mention a number
> of Web URLs, and it is true that HTML lets you turn mentions into hyperlinks
> in a very flexible way, it is NOT true that FAQ users are necessarily better
> served by the HTML-only style of hyperlink. For example, in a pure text FAQ
> we might have said
>
> [1] Jeff keeps a list online: http://abc.jeff.org/gnomes/list.html
>
> whereas in a pure HTML FAQ, using the A HREF container, we could say
>
> [2] Jeff keeps _a list online_
>
> and if you are lucky enough to be browsing the original HTML, clicking on
> the phrase would take you to the page. But which form is really better?
> Using modern email and Usenet clients, the URL in form [1] will be clickable
> anway; it's probably clickable in this message of mine, although it's a
> bogus page (i hope :)). And you can actually SEE the web address, instead
> of trying to glimpse it on a status bar or decode it from source.
I really don't care what your personal preference is for seeing URL's.
I personally much prefer hyper-links. I think it's pretty obvious
that the vast bulk of the net user population prefers hyperlinks,
since you don't see Web pages that are all text, "so you can actually
SEE the web address." That's not what people want, and it's frankly
astounding that you're asserting that this would be an improvement.
> If you happen to PRINT OUT or take a screenshot of the FAQ, form [1]
> preserves the full information for readers later on, while form [2] is
> frustratingly unusable.
>
> I understand the desire to create one's own beautiful publication. But I
> suggest that the needs of the community relying on each FAQ should be
> paramount. Getting the information to as many of them as possible, in the
> clearest possible format, should be the top priority.
Your point here seems to be that I should make sure that my FAQ is
formatted not for the typical audience, that is, net users on
computers, but instead for the pathological case of someone who
decides to, instead of clicking on a link, instead print out the page
and type the URL in later. Really that's too ridiculous to respond
to. And I will again note that if there IS someone with a
pathological fear of clicking on links, they can do a lynx -dump
THEMSELVES and get printable versions with URL's. This makes
infinitely more sense than to have ME remove the information or
clutter the presentation for ALL the users.
I'm not going to get drawn into this argument, as there are too many
people with personal identity tied up in the way the net worked in
1992 (my own first Usenet posting was in 1986). I just would like to
point out that if we had to invent Usenet and e-mail today, there's no
question that they would not be invented in 80-column text-only
formats. Formatting and hyper-links for newsgroup posts and e-mail
make sense for all the reasons they make sense for Web pages. At some
point we should stop harping about the way it used to work and start
thinking about the way it *should* work.
-Tom
(In response to another query, I maintain the rec.games.netrek FAQs).
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