Re: ALL: attachments

I find when writing collaboratively that MS Word's "change tracking" and 
editing facilities are very useful.  Sure there are ways to do this in 
HTML (like inventing a style sheet with a "change" tag), but they are not 
automatic and require just enough extra work that it tends not to get 
used.  Mike (Smith) and I tried doing that while editing the guide, and it 
just didn't work.  Mike ended up just doing diffs every time I made 
changes.

Anyway, I would never force MS Word on anyone, but it may make sense for 
smaller groups, like task forces for example, where all the member of the 
group agree, to use something like MS Word for developing a document, and 
then posting the HTML version of it when it's in some version-able draft 
form.  This way the process is still "open" (in that there are free MS 
Word "readers" out there), but the work doesn't have to be encumbered by 
lack of tool support.

-Chris

Dr. Christopher A. Welty, Knowledge Structures Group
IBM Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Dr., Hawthorne, NY  10532     USA   
 
Voice: +1 914.784.7055,  IBM T/L: 863.7055, Fax: +1 914.784.7455
Email: welty@watson.ibm.com, Web: 
http://www.research.ibm.com/people/w/welty/




"Jeremy Carroll" <jjc@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
Sent by: public-swbp-wg-request@w3.org
03/08/2004 08:44 AM
 
        To:     <public-swbp-wg@w3.org>
        cc: 
        Subject:        ALL: attachments




I took an action to explain methods of dealing with attachments etc in W3C
lists.

The following describes some policy,

http://www.w3.org/2002/03/email_attachment_formats.html

which in summary is

  plain text is best
  html or xhtml is second best


The harder case that is not explained in full is what do you do when you
have content in some proprietary format, particularly if the files are
large.
e.g. I had a document in a proprietary format that I wished to send to the
www-rdf-interest list.

Step 1) Create a PDF (if necessary this might been creating a postscript
file and then converting that with ghostview)

Step 2) send PDF as attachment to www-archive@w3.org
This mailing list is public but no natural subscribers, and is intended 
for
large attachments, amongst other purposes.

Step 3) Find URL of attachement by looking at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/

Step 4) Send URL to the intended mailing list e.g. see
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2004Feb/0231

where I note the long URL got mangled ...

Reviewing the policy I probably could have created an xhtml version with
only a little more effort than the PDF and that would have been better.

It is particularly important to use this technique of sending to 
www-archive
when the attachment is large.

If you wish to send something with member confidentiality to a public list
the same technique can be used by sending to w3c-archive@w3.org which is
archived at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-archive/

If you have a complex set of interlinked files in the same directory it is
possible to send them all as attachments to www-archive and the links will
be maintained. Example is:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2004Feb/att-0071/


Jeremy