Re: LYNX-DEV FAQ collection

[David Combs]

> From address@hidden Sat Nov 16 18:43:58 1996
> Date: Sat, 16 Nov 1996 19:26:43 -0700
> From: address@hidden (Scott McGee (Personal))
> 
> I have seen the discussion of FAQ's for Lynx, and have decided to at least 
> take
> a look at what's been done and being done. If anyone is now working on an FAQ
> for Lynx, please let me know, and also tell me what I might do to help. If 
> not,
> please, anyone who can, send me locations of any FAQ appropriate material so
> that I can assess the job of building a real FAQ.

Lynx has so much to learn about it, that we probably need SEVERAL
faqs:

    Basic faq

    Advanced faq: how it handles certain html things, etc: for
       people who can&do actually READ the raw html -- give
       them insight into how lynx works, so can better understand
       (from low level) what lynx does, why some html works and
      some doesn't, why some generate errors, others don't (because
      lynx "corrects" it, ...

    Installation faq: from seeing what goes by on this lynx-dev list,
      I'd imagine this faq would have to be HUGE.

    Hints and Tricks faq: 10,000 of what a USER would call a "trick"
      (although a lynx HACKER might say "it's obvious -- it doesn't 
       NEED to be documented; RTFM and then THINK!").

      Plus, it would have (if the manual didn't) a lot of the "WHY" this
      or that feature exists, ie both the obvious AND the NON-obvious uses for
      it.  DITTO for the settable-OPTIONS in:
         a: the command-line
         b: .lynxrc
         c: lynx.cfg


--------

How to find the information to put INTOI the faqs:

  A REAL BITCH:
    go through all the archives, and change the "SUBJECT:" lines
so they describe what they contain, THEN do auto-retreiving,
organizing, etc, of the archives, BY the new subject lines.

Another thing that would be nice would be keyword-markers
THROUGHOUT the text of archive items.  eg "keyword:(trick for mail)",
which some perl/awk/python program could scan for, index into associative
array (poor man's data base), etc.


Obviously FAR too much work to ever get done.

  (One speed-up: temporarily put archive-items into a few LARGE
    MULTI-item files, then in VI or EMACS, etc, make single-key
    macros that go-to-next-item (with "subject:" at top of screen),
    that change (or append to, for now, for safety) the title
    certain COMMON "subjects" (eg install-vms, install-solaris, ...,
    bad-html, source-code-explanation, Combs-nitpick, ..., etc.  
    THEN for most of the
    items in archive, it'd be only a couple of keystrokes.  That
    done, break the items back out into individual archive items again.)



But MAYBE we could get ourselves to use such archive-aids in all
NEW items we generate to this list.

Any ideas?  Comments?  Suggestions?  Anyone...?

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