Subject:
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Re: Format of FAQ items
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.faq
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Date:
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Sun, 25 Apr 1999 03:52:40 GMT
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Viewed:
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1822 times
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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...
> Sure, okay. Question" How
> cautious do we want to get about creeping featuritis? :-,
My theory on feeping creaturitis is: Make sure that the data structures and
data architecture allows for lots of different future feature-expansion
possibilities, so that there's an infinite amount of coding to be done, but
only implement (code) the most important things. Can always add additional
features later if/when they seem important or useful...otherwise adding them
right away is a waste of time if they don't provide any value. But it's
good to plan for the possibility of someday including them, because you
don't know what might come up later down the road.
I really don't want to spend a lot of time writing code to handle the
display of the FAQ questions on the webpages, or knitting them together for
posting, and this which limits the expressiveness of the data somewhat, but
even the most basic hierarchical feature set is infinitely more useful than
a flat file the traditional way, I think.
So I don't really mind if lots of extra "stuff" appears in the FAQ entries
(like revision histories and language origin headers) -- I just want to be
able to ignore all of this "noise" very simply. That's why the NNTP/SMTP
header approach is so nice. And it's very easily upgradeable to other,
richer formats way down the road, if doing so would prove more useful.
> > Say, the index file could also snarf up ("include") other sub-FAQs
> > simply by giving their directory name -- just like you would list a
> > filename.
>
> If you want to write the code for it, sure. :-,
Not a problem...this is really easy in Perl -- see the recursive function
slurp() here for a trivial example:
http://www.lugnet.com/news/display.cgi?lugnet.cad.dev:212
Doing this for a FAQ tree would only be about 5-10 additional lines of code,
plus a small FAQ object library for loading the FAQ objects and their index
objects.
> > OK, so let's see... Since the
> > include mechanism is necessary (it's too juicy and useful not to have)
> > and since the include mechanism can do everything (and more) that the
> > Location mechanism did, I don't think we need the Location mechanism.
>
> I don't agree. The Location header is still useful in cases where
> Include wouldn't be appropriate. For example, to allow Vancouver into
> the Washington state area -- you don't want to slurp Canada-specific
> headers into Washington state, but you'd still want some mechanism to
> note the geographic proximity.
Maybe we're thinking of different kids of include mechanisms... I'm not
thinking of the kind that includes other files for their definitions... I'm
thinking of the kind that says, "slurp in this other file of data and all of
its other sub-files of data" -- like the way an MPD works, for example. Can
you give some examples of usages of the other kind, where you'd just want to
pull in headers?
--Todd
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: Format of FAQ items
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| (...) Sure -- suppose you have a directory full of FAQ items, some of which have pretty much the same headers. e.g. Locations: /x/y/,/x/z/,/x/,/ Content-Language: qw Translated-From: er Topic-Level: 1 Instead of maintaining each of these in every (...) (26 years ago, 26-Apr-99, to lugnet.faq)
| | | Re: Format of FAQ items
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| (...) 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: (URL) Just the (...) (26 years ago, 30-Apr-99, to lugnet.faq)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Format of FAQ items
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| (...) You mean like a master Table of Contents? Sure, okay. Question" How cautious do we want to get about creeping featuritis? :-, (...) Yep. (...) Oh, yeah. Integers are better for an enumerated value. (...) If you want to write the code for it, (...) (26 years ago, 24-Apr-99, to lugnet.faq)
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