Simeon H.K. Fitch wrote:
not the group's. My original itch was that I'm very interested when a new tip or other info tidbit is available, and would like to know when that happens. Since you pointed out the CVS access to the FAQ I'll just do it myself.
Ok, no probs. That was part of of the idea of trying to keep a consistent header. If people get pissed off with seeing it once a week, they can just killfile it pretty easily. In fact, Sun's listproc does that too if you post the same subject twice in a given time, so I had to do some trickery to allow the mail to get through :)
That's a fair judgment call on your part. I'm in the camp that interprets the "frequent" part of FAQ very liberally, even to a speculative extreme:
I probably could do a little more that way, but I've never really gotten around to it. I think a lot of people on this list just sort of assume things like "it'll be done when it's given to us". One of these is Pixel/Vertex shaders. There should probably be a speculative entry in the FAQ about that (no J3D doesn't support them) but the question rarely gets asked. Just thinking about it, there's another reason too that sets this group apart from your typical usenet-style group/listproc. There aren't that many people trying to really stretch J3D in the way that you get for OpenGL/D3D. I reckon I could count the "high end" users on two hands. These folk are already comfortable with the capabilities and know where to go to find answers. There are also two BoFs held each year and the j3D team put out a set of outlines of Future Stuff there, which I transcribe and then post here and also on the website. That seems to cover most of those speculative questions too. So, going back to Pixel Shaders, at a BoF a while ago, DougT put out a slide of Things coming in 1.4 which answered that question pretty much before anyone that cared about it asked it.
RTFF, etc.). I'm just publicly wondering if there is something with either the format or the process by which the FAQ is contributed to and communicated that could be improved to increase the inherent value of the FAQ.
I'm sure there is. If people asked more questions we could put more stuff in :) I'm always open to suggestions and I usually try to jump to answer a question with the FAQ entry before anyone else does if I can. However, I do become rather unresponsive at times simply because of work load. So you'll see my participation here yo-yos pretty heavily, and the same thing with answering the aliases on the j3d.org site. (I only got around to putting in all the site link requests and stuff for the last 2 months a couple of days ago and still haven't actually responded to any of the emails yet).
good tips/tricks could be better archived (which IMO is a valid use of the FAQ).
Well, depending on the length of the tip, I normally try to make more of a tutorial out of it. That's what the Quick Fix section of j3d.org is about. It's just stuff that looks useful being slurped off the list here and formatted as a web page and off we go.
I'd also point out that some people may spend more time answering new questions if the response had a good chance of ending up in the FAQ
Actually, I think a lot don't answer because they simply don't have a clue about it. Again, comes down to volume of users. There's been a constant undercurrent of people doing stereo work with J3D, for example, and slow stream of questions about it. Unfortunately it has never lead to a conclusive answer about the various paths to take, so it's just ended up as one of those things that never gets a good FAQ entry even though it probably should. Similar thing with the questions you see from Davel Yazel at times. He's doing stuff at the bleeding edge of J3D which nobody else has really tried before. He generally doesn't get answers because nobody else (even the J3D team!) has any clue about what he's up to.
(JGO? Again, I may be from Pluto...)
Ah, my bad - JavaGaming.org
<snip> I checked it out and noticed the mix of style and content. The <question>/<answer> delineation is the most important here...
Yeah, that's just my hack to make life easier for the generation. Content is using a subset of XHTML, wrapping up in the large structural style elements. Since I know the only time the content stuff is really used is to generate the HTML pages, I felt that it was a sufficiently non-dodgy hack just to dump the HTML markup directly into the document itself. Saves me having to come up with a separate tagset to do it all myself. Again, one of those things where I should probably have used mixed-namespace content rather than the DTD/Entity hacking that I've done. If you come up with something a little less hacked up, I'd love to hear about it!
area). I like having a TOC of all the questions up front, and also being able to easily search and browse all content.
That's true. It's also one of those long-standing requests that people have had to put a search engine front-end onto the FAQ. Because of the way I maintain it as the flat-file XML, it's never really leant itself to the idea (although the XML-databases that are starting to become more prevalent might work for that) and so I keep putting it off....
it comes to including something in the FAQ. Would it be helpful if more people voiced their opinion when they see a question answered and think the exchange deserves to be included?
Let the rabble begin! :) -- Justin Couch http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/ Java Architect & Bit Twiddler http://www.yumetech.com/ Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer http://www.j3d.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- "Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now. Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with all your brains, would be useless in a mouse's universe..." - Greg Bear, Slant ------------------------------------------------------------------- =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
