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Subject: 
Re: Format of FAQ items
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.faq
Date: 
Fri, 30 Apr 1999 02:40:07 GMT
Viewed: 
1678 times
  
In lugnet.faq, lehman@javanet.com (Todd Lehman) writes:
In lugnet.faq, jsproat@geocities.com (Sproaticus) writes:
In lugnet.faq, Todd Lehman writes:
What about an outline format?  I made a cool little utility that
displays, in outline format, any sub-tree of the global ng tree...
so from any category sub-homepage you can see what's there beneath it
-- especially handy for things like loc groups and CAD and market and
robotics, etc.  Maybe that would be nice for the FAQ too.

You mean like a master Table of Contents?

Yes & no.  'Yes' in that a master TOC would/could appear.  But 'no' in that
the master TOC would just be a special case of a general-purpose sub-
hierarchy TOC, which just happens to start at the top.  I built one of these
just for fun a couple weeks ago for the ng's, showing their structure and
their charters, and it actually turned out to be very useful.  It was only
about 2 hours of hacking, most of it HTMLing...

Jeremy,

Here's what I was chattering about -- here's a little demo of the prototype
ng-hierarchy-TOC generator that I use to help visualize the ng layout
whenever a question comes up...

   A top-level overview, going 2 layers deep:
      http://www.lugnet.com/sitemap.cgi

   Just the topmost layer of the .loc hierarchy:
      http://www.lugnet.com/sitemap.cgi?/loc/&d=1

   The entire .loc.us hierarchy:
      http://www.lugnet.com/sitemap.cgi?/loc/us/&d=3

   The entire .market hierarchy:
      http://www.lugnet.com/sitemap.cgi?/market/

   A top-level overview, going all the way down to the leaf nodes:
      http://www.lugnet.com/sitemap.cgi?/&d=5

With 650+ groups, I think it shows things in a more comprehensible way
than than the other big lists*.  (Note: the d= thingy defaults to d=2 if
unspecified.)

Something analogous to this could certainly be made use of for a FAQ
outliner, and hyperlinked into the group homepages for improved two-way
browseability.  The same could that dumps out the question-outline could
even perhaps be used to give the questions & answers as a tree.  Then you
could print out that big mammoth 500-page FAQ and read it on a trip that you
were talking about.  :)

--Todd


* The other big lists:
http://www.lugnet.com/news/groups/loc/
http://www.lugnet.com/news/groups/



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: Format of FAQ items
 
(...) Verrry nice. I have often wanted something like this for browsing Yahoo!, but it would never crystalize in my mind. If that made any sense. :-, (...) Could you give a formatting option to use a single size fixed-width font, wrapped at, say, 78 (...) (25 years ago, 30-Apr-99, to lugnet.faq)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Format of FAQ items
 
(...) Yes & no. 'Yes' in that a master TOC would/could appear. But 'no' in that the master TOC would just be a special case of a general-purpose sub- hierarchy TOC, which just happens to start at the top. I built one of these just for fun a couple (...) (25 years ago, 25-Apr-99, to lugnet.faq)

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