FAQ's (well this subject line is so original)

[Simon Branford]

Hi all;

I am away for a couple of days (i.e. the weekend) and will be getting down
to serious FAQ writing when I get back.
While we were having all the Yahoo problems I decided to unsubscribe. Now I
cannot resubscribe and so cannot get into any of the chats!

"How can I judge how long a FAQ is becoming?"

One of the few bits of advice that anyone has given me about writing web
pages is that people do not really like to scroll too much. I have no idea
if this is true but generally go with the idea of producing lots of smaller
pages. This can however lead to the opposite problem of making too many
different pages to be viewed to get the required information.

I am at the moment working on the predictions for books 5,6 and 7 FAQ and
the major decision I seem to have is whether to make it one page or one for
each book. The matter is complicated, as some predictions do not really fall
into being in one book or another. Ideas?

"As a former English major, I'm a bit of a grammarian.  Does anyone have any
serious objections to Melanie & I doing final edits on all the FAQ's (purely
for stylistic points -- nothing substantive)?"

This sounds like a very good point as far as I am concerned. My spelling and
grammar can be very bad!

"I was thinking of things that could be listed by direct reference to the
books, such as spells/charms, rather than as yet undisclosed questions or
inconsistencies... I think Penny was agreeing with my proposal to list all
of them and add discussion where it has occurred."

Sorry for the misunderstanding of the question asked. I guess this is what I
have done on the start of the wand FAQ and it seems a reasonable aproach.

"For updating purposes, how will each FAQ maintainor go about updating
his/her FAQ's?  That is -- will I be required to learn HTML coding in order
to go in & update my FAQ's?  That might be a good thing if I were forced to
learn --- just curious though."

I am not sure about how the maintenance should work. If we could convince a
larger number of people to get involved at this stage it would be fantastic.
As we are now on e-groups and this has a better search facility (I believe
this is the case but have yet to try it) it may just be a case of
encouraging newbie's to search through the archives.
One way of learning some HTML is to compare a document you have written with
the HTML page it becomes. This is in sort of the way that I learnt the HTML
that I know use. I used to use authoring programs, such as Publisher,
Frontage and Word, but now go straight into Notepad.

Simon

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