Re: Work in progress: ASCII art FAQ 3.0.-2

.----- On Tue, 30 Mar 1999 15:20:48 +1200, Matthew Thomas posted:
|
|1. INTRODUCING ADA
|
|Martin Atkins wrote:
|>
|> .----- On Fri, 26 Mar 1999 12:14:51 -0500, Martin DiViaio posted:
|> |All the FAQ documents should be combined into one document. Yes, I
|> |know this makes a monster but it does put all the information in one
|> |place and gets rid of repetitive information in some documents.
|> '----------------------
|> That would be the ideal thing, but having a huge document (I feel) may
|> turn people away from taking the time to read it, defeating it's
|> object. The documents with obvious headings ('Monospaced Fonts. Text
|> Editors and ASCII Utils!' and 'Not looking right? Read this') help to
|> give newbies (for want of a better word) an obvious place to look for
|> the two most asked questions of all. This will need to be kept obvious
|> in some way.
|
|My hope is to make many of those other documents redundant by repeating
|what they say in the FAQ, without making the FAQ too long. But it would
|be quite reasonable for there to be other documents which go off into
|far more detail on specific topics -- for example, Martin's registry
|patch for Outlook Express 4, or Daniel Au's tutorial on how to start
|drawing ASCII art. It's these documents, I think, which should form what
|I hereby suggest be called the ASCII-Art Documentation Archive (ADA).
'-----------------------------------
Wow! That's a much better name than I came up with :o)

.-----------------------------------
|What I'd like to be able to do is give a brief answer to each question
|in the FAQ, and then a couple of links to more detailed information at
|the end of each answer. For example, at the end of `I like that ASCII
|picture -- can I copy it for myself?', I'd have a link to the Copyright
|Myths FAQ. And at the end of `How do I draw my own ASCII art?', I'd link
|to a few tutorials. And so on.
'-----------------------------------
That is an excellent idea, and makes the FAQ what it should be ... a
document to find answers to questions that are frequently asked. New users
can get a brief look at the FAQ, while people seeking answers to a
particular question can refer to the more detailed and specialised
documents.

.-----------------------------------
|2. MIRROR, MIRROR, ON THE WEB ...
'-----------------------------------

    |||||
   | o o |
   |  >  |      |_| /\ |
   | \_/ | ---' | |/""\o
    \___/
     | |   Nice one :o)


.------------------------------------
|Andreas Freise wrote:
|>
|> Hold it! Do you want to be responsible for the mirror sites
|> (well, at least for the URL list, mailing list, etc)
|> for ALL those informational documents? Or do you want to create
|> two different mirror site lists?? If none of that is the case 
|> better talk to Martin first and best wait until there is
|> some agreement on how we'd like to do it.
|
|Fair enough. Martin, I'm going to be on holiday for three weeks from the
|end of this week, so I'll leave it up to you to organize the list of
|mirrors for the ADA. I'll leave decisions over what is and isn't in it
|up to you, but if there's useful stuff in it I'll link to it from the
|FAQ -- if there's not, I won't. :-)
'-------------------------------
OK, I'll get going on that one this week while I'm not at school.

.-------------------------------
|I'm a bit ambivalent about the actual need for dozens of mirrors myself.
|I'm on a fast Internet connection, so perhaps I'm biased, but I think
|about half a dozen copies, spread fairly evenly over the Earth's surface
|:-), should be more than adequate to guard against slow access or
|accidental destruction.
'-------------------------------
We don't *need* loads, but surely if people are willing to host mirrors
that's all the better isn't it?

.-------------------------------
|As for filenames, I think the directory on each mirror should be called
|ada/ and the files should have the same names on each mirror. The table
|of contents should be called index.html, so that it can be linked to
|from the FAQ just by saying `http://what.ever/~someone/ada/". If
|particular mirrors are on systems which don't automatically look for
|index.html in a directory, then they can rename index.html to index.htm
|or default.htm or whatever, whenever they unzip the update they receive
|from Martin.
'-------------------------------
That's kinda what I've been saying, but I said aaafaq/ :o)
There is however the problem of hosting sites (Geocities?) that don't allow
the use of directories. I'm not supposed to have one on my
voices.vossnet.co.uk/a/atkins/ account, but working at my ISP gives me
certain abilities beyond the average user. :o)
For these people they will need to call the file ada.htm or something, and
also the perpose of the files being named aaasomething.txt on my current FAQ
site was exactly this... so that there is little chance of interferance with
other files on the site.

.-------------------------------
|3. LINKS 101
|
|llizard wrote:
|>
|> Things look fine to me so far. I have only one minor point (an html
|> issue). I recently found out that for linking to a newsgroup, one must
|> include the two slashes after the colon.
|> 
|> <A HREF="news://alt.ascii-art">alt.ascii-art</a>
|
|Oh No One Mustn't! That's not for *groups*, that's for *servers*.
|When you are referring to a group on a specific NNTP server, you use the
|slashes -- for example, news://news.canterbury.ac.nz/alt.ascii-art. But
|if you're referring to a widely propagated group which you can
|reasonably expect to be hosted on any NNTP server, you just put news:alt.ascii-art.
'--------------------------
Well, I was half right in my reply to this in another thread above. ;o)

.--------------------------
|4. FORMAT WARS
|
|Martin Atkins wrote:
|>
|> I feel that it is easier for all concerned to just have one copy of
|> the main FAQ in plain text format... if we have an HTML version and a
|> Text version hanging around things will be harder to keep under
|> control and keep people updated.
|
|Well, speak for yourself! I've had no problems keeping parallel HTML and
|text versions of the FAQ up-to-date over the past two years, and I will
|continue to do so. The HTML version contains hypertext links both to its
|various subsections (e.g. `see Question 4') and to external documents.
|
|As soon as this FAQ is finished, I'll e-mail Martin both versions (text
|and HTML) to put in ADA. So those people who want easy links, and can
|put up with the occasional popup, can use the HTML version; and those
|who want `just the FAQs, ma'am' can go to the text version.
|
|Everybody happy?
'---------------------------
That of course is the ideal solution to the HTML/TXT arguement... use both.
I have had trouble maintaining two versions on my minifaq since it started
(the one on my website is very out of date) but hey, if you're doing it! <g>

.---------------------------
|5. BETWEEN THE STYLE SHEETS
|
|I don't think that any mirror-specific formatting should be added
|to any of the documents. This is to help people searching the Web for
|the documents: search engines can tell if two documents are exactly the
|same, and show links to the duplicates underneath the first copy. Any
|formatting added means that the documents are no longer exact
|duplicates, so the search engines will unnecessarily show them as
|separate entries and it will be harder for people searching the Web to
|tell what is which.
'-------------------------
That's a good arguement which I hadn't thought of. There is the problem of
code added to the tops and bottoms of pages by GeoCities, Tripod, Hypermart
etc... but that's another thing entirely.

That's an interesting point actually ... should people add GeoGuides to the
FAQ documents or allow the dreaded popups to take over?

.----------------------------
|A couple of years in the future, perhaps, I will include a relative link
|in the HTML version of the FAQ to an "../ada.css" which will sit in the
|parent directory of ada/ (whichever directory that happens to be for
|that mirror): that way they can apply verious styles to their copy if
|they so desire, without the actual data in the FAQ file being any
|different. Martin could distribute a default ada.css to the mirroring
|people, for those who didn't care about doing it themselves.
'---------------------------
The version I have already has a .css file, but that's up for review of
course!

.---------------------------
|But, as I say, that's a couple of years away yet.
'---------------------------
Yes.

.---------------------------
|Martin Atkins wrote:
|>
|> If you use CSS properly it allows you to make it look nice on 'decent'
|> browsers while making it usable on older ones, and making it almost
|> plain text (very minimal markup). Therefore I believe that that should
|> be what is used... might be just me, though.
|
|The problem is, Martin, that modern browsers don't implement CSS
|*properly* (not even Opera, although it comes close). In an ideal world
|browsers would perfectly implement the parts of CSS which they could,
|and leave the rest alone completely; but what both Netscape Navigator
|and Internet Explorer (and, to a lesser extent, Opera) do is
|*incorrectly* implement parts of CSS, which makes it almost unusable
|from a Webmaster's point of view. For now.
'------------------------
It depends really. I hate to do it again, but I'm going to point at my
current FAQ site. That uses CSS, but only simple bits of it. This means that
ot should work fine on any CSS browser. It works on Netscape 4 and on
Internet Explorer 4 and 5... I've tried it. As for Opera, well I need to be
at work to try that, since my work pc has that and a few other browsers on
it.

.--------------------------
|As for me, I have style sheets, Java, Javascript, custom colors, and
|custom fonts all turned off in my browser, and I have never enjoyed Web
|surfing more ...
'--------------------------
There's my point. The user has the choice of whether they want CSS or not!
Llizard chooses to not even use a CSS enabled browser!

.--------------------------
|6. PROGRESS
|
|As before, [bits like this] are notes to myself, and many of them show
|where I'm going to insert new stuff. They'll be deleted in the final
|version.
|
|Well, I fixed the wonky lettering in the title. I also finished Question
|4. I started rewriting Question 5, but it turned out to be a bit more
|complicated than I expected -- I think I'll farm this out to a separate
|document which can supersede Martin's `ASCII ART NOT LOOKING RIGHT? READ
|THIS!' (which, in turn, was based on my FAQ). I'll just shorten Question
|5 down to a general instruction to find a fixed-width font, one small
|enough not to wrap 72 characters; and I'll include a link to the more
|detailed Troubleshooting document. In the meantime, volunteers are
|sought to fill in the [???] blanks!
'-----------------------------
Yes you correctly spot that my document was based on yours, and I'm sorry I
never mentioned that fact (I don't know *why* I didn't, and thought I had!)
- I'd say that I'd update it, but if you are going to supersede it there's
no point <g>)

.--------------------------------
|I've updated the Figlet links in Question 10, and trimmed all the dead
|ones. One in particular, http://www.sconnect.net/figlet/index.cgi, was
|interesting. The address http://www.sconnect.net/ gave me an error like so:
|----
|Time to upgrade
|513 HTTP 2.0 or higher required
|
|The site you have requested requires that your web browser support
|version 2.0 or higher of the HTTP standard. The latest versions of
|Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer and the America On-Line
|web browser all support this standard.
|----
|I'm using Netscape 4.5, what `latest version' are they on about???
'----------------------
The SysAdmin is confused. *Very* confused.

.-----------------------------
|Another, http://www2.webserve.net/gateways/figletgateway.pl, looks to be
|all there but doesn't actually do anything. Can someone else confirm this?
'----------------------------
Not at the moment I can't! (I'm offline)

.----------------------------
|I was going to do a pile of other stuff, but this room is really hot and
|I'm having trouble staying awake, so ... I won't.
'---------------------------
No rush! :o)

.---------------------------
|Finally, Martin, it wouldn't be a bad idea if you took the `Ten
|Commandments' and put them in a separate document.
'----------------------------
No sooner said than done.

.----------------------------
|
|This FAQ is regularly posted to news:alt.ascii-art and
|news:alt.ascii-art.animation. On the Web, the FAQ and other useful
|documents can be found in the ASCII-art Documentation Archive at the
|following locations:
|*   http://martweb.hypermart.net/ada/
|*   http://website.lineone.net/~martin.atkins/ada/
|*   http://voices.vossnet.co.uk/a/atkins/ada/
|[get list from Martin later]
'------------------------
hehe... I guess I've got no option but to change that now! (Not that I mind
of course!)

.---------------------------
|    
|    G.  Press the F12 function key.
'------------------
Do what? What's that meant to do?

.---------------------    
|    J.  From the Edit menu, choose Preferences. Expand the `Navigator'
|        tree item. Select the `Fonts' tree item. Set the `Fixed width
|        font' combo box to a fixed-width font.
|        * If you need help choosing a fixed-width font, --> I
|        * Otherwise, do this then --> Y
'-----------------
I think I've just got what you are doing :o)   --- sorry!
        
.------------------------
|9.  I want a picture of something -- how do I ask for one?
|----------------------------------------------------------
|     Yes, if we find it interesting. Give your request the subject
|     `REQ: xyz' if you're looking for a picture of an xyz, then in the
'------------------------
This still doesn't make sense! *nudge, nudge* :o)

.----------------------------
|    that there is a program called Figlet which does that sort of thing
'---------------------------
<pedantic>FIGlet should be spelt like that, with a capital FIG and a small
let. Ask either of the three of the authors FIG stands for!</pedantic>

.----------------------------
|
|12. Where can I find more ASCII art?
|------------------------------------
|
|
|THE END
|
'----------------------------
HAHAHA SEARCHING IS FUTILE --- YOU WILL NOT FIND ANY ASCII ART, ANYWHERE!!!
YAHAHAHAHA!!!



-Martin
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