Nope; the only thing the process deals with is approving postings. It
takes so long because these people are volunteers, and because there
are so many requests. This is entirely separate from maintainging a
FAQ, or posting a FAQ to a newsgroup other than *.answers.
For example, I've been posting my FAQ to comp.cad.autocad for a month
or more, and only yesterday recieved permission to post to *.answers.
If the essential feature of the approval procedure is to automate archival
by rtfm.mit.edu, surely it could be much more simply stated.
That's all it's for. They just told this list they were rewriting the
document, so perhaps it will become simpler. They should at least state
that fact up front, in the first paragraph. In all caps if necessary.
Keep this at least notionally distinct from writing the FAQ themselves and
their features.
Perhaps its about time that someone put together an informational RFC
bringing options together for further development of Tim's ideas. Maybe this
will suggest to us a suitable way to develop this idea, given the legacies
involved.
The reason I suggest this is because for a part of my working life, I worked
for the Australian federal government and was involved in a project that
developed perhaps one of the most convoluted pieces of English ever written
for public consumption : ( I understand bureaucracy and legalese mentality.
I guess I am advocating that it must be time to refresh the approach to the
FAQ and its accessibility and what place better to start than this group.
Robert
Exactly on target. There simply never has been one centralized
document that states all the differnt current procedures (there are a
bunch of lists in a bunch of places, but none with any concrete
structure). And there has never been any attempt to define a preferred
FAQ structure.
We need to do both. So who will volunteer to document the existing
standards? I think we need at least the following components:
* the digest format (include it in our document, not just reference
it)
* tools used to maintain something in the digest format.
* other commonly-used formats, including Tom Fine's.
* readers that can use clues (in the digest format or others) to
navigate through a FAQ, whether designed for that specific purpose or
not -- but listed separately). Things like change marks, sections,
etc.
* document the various ways that newsreaders understand URLs. This
should be simply for reference, for they all do it differently, and
there needs to be one standard used, period.
Then, we need to work on the new format(s), hopefully basing it on an
existing standard, so that we have some idea of how to write software
to work with it. Personally, I think it should be Tom Fine's standard,
enhanced based on his wishlist, and then taken from there. We need
search tools as well, that can search either on full-text or just on
header fields.
Hopefully, we can get Tim to help with this part.
[
Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive |
Search Mail Archive |
Authors |
Usenet
]
[
1993 |
1994 |
1995 |
1996 |
1997
]
© Copyright The Landfield Group, 1997
All rights reserved