Tom Holub wrote:
> 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.
Formatting (in the sense of changing typefaces, weights and sizes) does
improve readability, which can be important when your FAQ is intended to be
read at a sitting. In other cases, as when the FAQ is designed to be
cherry-picked for specific technical data or programming code examples,
"readable" formatting may be unimportant or a positive hindrance.
What is certain is that if someone today is tasked with answering a
question, and they do their research and unearth a FAQ and (as is still
usually true today) that FAQ is a plain .txt file sitting one someone's FTP
or mail server, they will download it (quickly), they will get their answer
very nicely, and AT NO TIME will the topic of discussion turn to why it was
in plain text, or whether it should have been marked up with more weights,
faces and sizes. Nobody really cares about that stuff when they have real
work to do.
> Hyper-links do an even better job of this.
The referent to "this" seems to be "increase the information density while
improving readability." Hyperlinks don't, in and of themselves, improve
readability, since they are not text, but an action taken on text. They can
increase information density, but only if multiple links point to a common
target paragraph (that would otherwise have had to be duplicated in a plain
text treatment). Popup glossary boxes can increase information density.
> > 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 have an external standard at work here: I define "important information"
as ANSWERS TO FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS, period. How do I spot the Space
Shuttle when it passes overhead? Go here, do this. What happened to the
DeLorean used in BACK TO THE FUTURE? It's in such and such a collection.
What do I do when my baby does XYZ? There are two schools of thought, etc.
Is Mel Gibson really an American? Yes, born in upstate NY, emigrated but
never naturalized Aussie.
Answering these questions is what we do, at least in our guise as FAQ
maintainers. Everything else is peripheral, DEFINITELY including such great
questions as whether to use Bold Italic Garamond in some subhead.
> 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.
That is not particularly useful in a FAQ context. People have been doing
fine in plain text for a long time, and nothing has profoundly changed that
would affect the choice. Which isn't to say that you shouldn't have a
formatted version online, but we should never con ourselves into thinking
that the style sheet du jour is 1/10th as important as the topic-oriented
questions and answers themselves.
> I really don't care what your personal preference is for seeing URL's.
> I personally much prefer hyper-links.
This is a false dichotomy, since links anchored on text representations of
the URL's (rather than on adjacent descriptive text) are still hyper-links.
On the Web everyone "prefers hyper-links" but the question is what you link
from.. In the example I gave ("Jeff keeps a list online"), both variants
used hyperlinks.
> 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.
My point is that you should not make parochial judgments about what
constitutes a "typical audience" versus a "pathological" audience, but
instead assume that when you publish an important information resource, it
WILL migrate to media and environments you didn't anticipate, and - if you
place user satisfaction first - you should bend over backwards to ensure
that the FAQ remains maximally useful no matter how it's distributed.
Creating an imaginary "typical audience" consisting of browsing Web visitors
at some site du jour is risky and unwise. The primary mission of a FAQ
maintainer should not be running a pretty website, but tracking user
questions and getting the answers out.
Of course there are maintainers who will read all this and go "Huh, what's
he talking about, now where'd I put that MouseOver attribute." :) I don't
expect to convert the world. But if you've been thinking about this stuff
or looking for some guidance, this is my perspective. It is MORE
important -- if our underlying topics matter -- to be maximally informative
to as many users as possible, than to look as pretty as possible to a
favored subset of users we decide to focus on.
> 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.
We do invent stuff all the time, and most of the stuff we invent is not
itself confined to 80-column ASCII text; but the programs, specifications,
and administrative documentation that allows the new stuff to work, ARE
still distributed in ASCII text. The reason being that when *core content*
matters more than cosmetics, text still rules, and quite possibly always
will.
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