----- Unsent message follows -----
Received: from malasp.mala.BC.CA by MIT.EDU with SMTP
id AA18719; Fri, 26 Nov 93 13:32:04 EST
Received: from oneb by mala.bc.ca (MX V3.3 VAX) with UUCP; Fri, 26 Nov 1993
10:31:53 PST
Received: by oneb.almanac.bc.ca (/\=-/\ Smail3.1.18.1 #18.33) id
<m0p37po-000053C@oneb.almanac.bc.ca>; Fri, 26 Nov 93 10:24 PST
Message-Id: <m0p37po-000053C@oneb.almanac.bc.ca>
Subject: Re: Summary: Comments made on 1st Run FAQL Format
To: faq-maintainers@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 26 Nov 93 10:23:59 PST
From: Ken McVay <kmcvay@oneb.almanac.bc.ca>
In-Reply-To: <9311261648.AA07071@ma.itd.com>; from "Jeff Blaine" at Nov 26, 93
10:48 am
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL0]
You wrote:
| 1. My format allows for specific reference sections which can
| be turned into WWW URLs. Example:
What, pray tell, is a "WWW URL?"
Why do I care about it as a format, if my faq's can be read in raw ASCII by
tens of thousands of net.readers, and conveniently printed, without changes,
for hard-copy distribution?
| That previous reference can easily be transformed into a URL
| embedded in an HTML document so that people can interactively
| read the document. i.e. all of that above becomes:
What's an HTML document?
Why do I care about _it_ as a format?
| 2. I am not writing this FAQ list format to handle only conversion
| to HTML. If accepted and implemented, I will write conversion
| utilities to AND from the following:
| FAQL 1.0
| HTML
| LaTeX
| Maybe GNU Info
See above - I suspect that there may be millions of potential readers who
don't know any of the above exist, but they can read ASCII.
| 3. If people don't feel that my proposed FAQ list format is different
| or beneficial enough to use, I'd still be happy to spend some time
| writing a T_FineFAQL -> LaTeX converter, but nothing else.
|
| Last comments:
| If people don't want to use my format, it would make things a whole
| lot easier if they used HIS format instead of their own. I'd
| almost go so far as to request to the moderator that FAQ lists to
| be posted to news.answers MUST follow whatever format gets decided
| on. It really does the end readers a lot of good to have the
| FAQ list in a ``common'' format that conversion utilities are
| available for. And I know many of you reading this are about
| to break a vein because you feel so laboured just to have to write
| FAQ lists that it should be in "whatever damn format I want, who
| cares if people reading it can't convert it. That's the way *I*
| want it because I'm writing it."
| Very sad.
I am trying to understand why you seem to think such things are important.
After five years on the net, I have yet to see a need for any other format
than those commonly in use - i.e. ASCII. Perhaps that is because I personally
have no need to get fancy - I don't even have a word processor on my XENIX
machine, _or_ a text processor worth mentioning.
While I can see some future advantage to some sort of hypertext format, I
wonder if your comments above don't smack of "we, the technically correct,
will tell the ignorant masses what to do and how to do it." I, the ignorant
masses, object.
While you are free to convert your work six ways to Sunday, you have yet to
convince me that there is any need whatsover to re-write several hundred
pages of text to accommodate some fancy wizbangs lots of folks don't have
and don't need.
[
Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive |
Search Mail Archive |
Authors |
Usenet
]
[
1993 |
1994 |
1995 |
1996 |
1997
]
© Copyright The Landfield Group, 1997
All rights reserved