In comp.lang.javascript message <
[email protected]
september.org>, Thu, 21 May 2009 17:34:32, Garrett Smith
It is more important to get the FAQ right first, before putting effort
into anything else. Too few people read the FAQ anyway; hardly any will
read the Notes.
Since the regular posting of FAQ parts has been working incorrectly for
a couple of months at least, most of it has not been reviewed lately;
remember that you are the editor rather than the author.
Until the regular posting is fixed, I suggest that you post sections
manually each day that you are at your machine, starting at the end and
working backwards. Straight copy'n'paste from the Web view will
suffice.
Secondly, there is no real need for the FAQ notes to link to specific
FAQ articles, which may in any case have changed enough to make the
references moot. Just ensure that top and bottom of each FAQ Note page
have links to the FAQ itself. Let the connection be made by the test
of the subjects.
Before anything else is done to the Notes, they should be reviewed for
decrepitude, and problems fixed or noted. For example,
<
http://jibbering.com/faq/faq_notes/faq_notes.html#toc> says
[link] The complete FAQ and Notes in ZIP format (174KB)
which contains
"comp.lang.javascript FAQ - 8.1 - 2005-11-05".
There is no great need nowadays to provide such ZIPs, and it is
positively wasteful when they turn out to be out-of-date.
It might be easier to keep the Notes as they were a year ago, as an
archive. and build and maintain, in a different directory, an entirely
new structure filled by selective copying and editing.
The notes index page is linked from the faq.
I do not agree that this index page should be included on the FAQ. This
would make the TOC excessively long.
We discussed that before, and I thought that you had understood. The
FAQ should contain about 20 lines for the Notes Index part; it should
link only to what the top level of UL in the full Notes index links to,
except miscellaneous, plus the contents of miscellaneous. That should
be one link per FAQ notes web page. It would not be in the FAQ TOC; it
would be in a subsection of a FAQ section, perhaps "3.3 What are the FAQ
Notes?"
In <
http://jibbering.com/faq/faq_notes/faq_notes.htm>, there should be a
conspicuous link to the FAQ; not just one buried in a paragraph at the
bottom. Make the second t in that page upper-case, and make that "The
comp.lang.javascript FAQ" be itself a link to the FAQ. That will be
conspicuous, especially when you get rid of the non-default colouring
of link-related text.
The FAQ, as seen here, has an _apparent_ CSS fault. There is a big gap
after headings (almost always) and a small one before them; it should be
the other way round. Your code, but my whitespace :
... input elements in a way that is useful.</p>
<h3 id='propertyAccess'>
<a class='empty' name='propertyAccess'> </a>
8.2 My element is named myselect[], how do I access it?</h3>
<a class='empty' name='FAQ4_25'> </a>
<p>Form controls with ...
The FAQ4_25 part should be within the H3, perhaps first, I suspect :
yes, seems so. And the CSS should give extra spacing before <Hn>;
perhaps about an em for <H2> decreasing smoothly to almost nothing for
<H6>.
Perhaps that is the best XML can give - I suspect that the XML is a
handicap rather than an advantage, and it would be better to abandon it.
