Re: COBOL FAQ *moved*

Are YOU having problems accessing the FAQ? If so, what problems are you having?

Again, I am happy to try and "fix" any problems that get reported to me. So far
(less than one day in this location) I haven't heard any. The FAQ has been
created this way for SEVERAL years now, and I haven't heard complaints about
people not being able to read it or use it.

As far as others "taking it over," that isn't a concern of mine. If it ever
becomes so, I will be happy to consider another approach.

As far as the size of the HTML file generated, I understand that, .... and
anyone who is using a 300 or 2400 baud dial-up to read it, can feel free to
contact me (at my email address which is easily available) and I will send them
a "plain text" version.

***

Sorry to be sarcastic, but, although I understand others problems with M$ and
its products, they do what I want to do and work fine for me. I certainly do
NOT force others to use them and I am seriously interested in hearing about any
problems the current FAQ (or the FAQ from the last several years) causes for
non-IE users.

--
Bill Klein
wmklein <at> ix.netcom.com
"clvrmnky" <clvrmnky-uunet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:hfNMe.7748$p5.2092@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx!nnrp1.uunet.ca...
> On 17/08/2005 10:03 AM, William M. Klein wrote:
>> Did you have problems accessing it - and if so, what problems?
>>
>> I (personally) really LIKE the Microsoft Word -> Web-page facility and will
>> try
>> and "fix" problems that it causes (if significant), but otherwise will
>> (probably) stick with what works easily for me.
>>
>
> Sure, authoring such pages in Word is easy. However, it generates
> almost completely non-standard content. This means you have almost no
> guarantee that anyone will be able to read it. This is not just
> nit-picking. Do you intend everyone in the intended audience to be able
> to read it? What if they don't have IE? What if they need to use a
> screen-reader because of sight difficulties?
>
> The HTML it makes is also many, many times larger than it needs to be,
> and is nearly impossible to maintain with any other editor. You are
> also tied to a proprietary second-level file format. There is no
> guarantee that your document will render to HTML in a similar or
> reasonable way in the future.
>
> Woe betide anyone who takes over the editorship of your Word file in the
> future. For the skys will run red with poorly validated CSS applied
> (and re-applied) to each and every HTML tag, and spurious and missing
> end-tags.
>
> The way, IMHO, the ideal way to maintain a document like this is in SGML
> or some other (even simpler) markup language. Then you generate the
> text, PDF, HTML, XHTML content automagically based on a single source
> document.
>
> If you don't need the powertool that SGML is, you can always consider
> one of the simpler document forms, like DocBook. DocBook is sort of
> SGML-lite, and was designed exactly for things like HOWTOs and FAQs.


.

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