Re: hypercard faq?

[nathan@visi.com (Nathan Mates)]

In article <5eksfh$q74@uni.library.ucla.edu>,  <pubpc1@library.ucla.edu> wrote:
>On the other hand, putting the A2 FAQ into a hypercard or
>hyperstudio stack: now that would make it easy to access.  Maybe
>some hypercard or hyperstudio gurus would like to give it a shot.

   "Easy to access"??? What the heck are you smoking today? For
starters, you'd instantly shaft every non-GS Apple II owner, everyone
who doesn't have hypercard already (and since the FAQ says where to
download it, instant catch-22), people trying to read the FAQ online
from unix or IBM PCs, and the like.  In other words, you probably just
made it inaccessible to (in my not-so-humble opinion) probably at
least 90% of the people that'd want to read it.

   Text and/or html is readable by almost everyone on everything. 
I've got a table of contents and well-defined section headers, so
anyone with a text viewer and search (even if it's nothing more than
going to the next page a lot of times) can read and search the FAQ.

   If someone wants to convert the FAQ to a hypercard/hyperstudio
format, that's fine by me (warning-- I update the FAQ on the WWW
a *lot*; are the other version maintainers prepared to keep up with
all the changes). However, I'm not planning to move the FAQ away
from its current form at all, for the reasons described above.

   Sorry for stepping on the toes of hypercard/hyperstudio fanatics,
but I don't see those products as (1) widespread, especailly in the
Apple II community (2) readable by anyone anywhere. Therefore, I don't
see it as a very viable distribution medium that _I_'d like to put the
existing FAQs in. Someone else wants to do the work, fine, but my
primary emphasis on the FAQ is universal readability and portability.

Nathan Mates

--
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.visi.com/~nathan/      <*>
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