At regular intervals, I post an FAQ pointer in the newsgroup comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html (known to its habitués as "c.i.w.a.h"). The text of that article is below.
Formerly: "HTML FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) List"
This notice is posted at regular intervals. I'll endeavor to use the same subject line so that those of you who have seen it can kill-file the subject; additionally, Supersedes: headers are used to ensure that only one copy resides on a given news server.
This notice was last updated in May, 2007, and is available (with a complete revision history) on the World Wide Web at http://www.stack.nl/~boris/HTML/ciwahfaq.html. Most of it was written by Stan Brown.
In general, HTML. This is (or is supposed to be) a narrowly focused newsgroup that covers just one of the facets of Web authorship. For related areas, see number 3 below.
c.i.w.a.h.'s charter is:
This newsgroup covers discussion of HyperText Markup Language (HTML) as it relates to web page authoring. Possible subjects include HTML editors, formatting tricks, and current and proposed HTML standards.
The charter may be retrieved from
The FAQ list for any newsgroup is the distilled wisdom of experts in the subject area of that newsgroup, who have more or less agreed on a set of answers to the questions that are frequently asked there.
Before you post a question, please read the nearest thing we've got to a newsgroup FAQ, which is the Web Design Group's Web Authoring FAQ, at:
along with the Frequently Encountered Problems list at
If you do that, you may find that you've answered your question with no need to post (and no confusion from well-meaning wrong answers).
If the main site (either "http://www.htmlhelp.org/" or "http://www.htmlhelp.com/") is down, you migh consider using the mirror at "http://www.stack.nl/htmlhelp/".)
Many people maintain links to helpful resources for HTML
authors.
You'll find my list (originally by Stan Brown) at http://www.stack.nl/~boris/HTML/links.html.
Please subscribe to news.announce.newusers for a month or so. It's a low-volume newsgroup, but will well repay your time. The articles there explain how to get the best use out of Usenet news, how to post, rules of "netiquette", and so on. If you do not feel up to that, ar least read RFC 1855 (http://www.faqs.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt), which also explains netiquette.
Questions about your particular newsreader software should be posted to news.software.readers or alt.usenet.offline-reader. Questions about Usenet, newsgroups, and netiquette can be posted to news.newusers.questions after you read the material in news.announce.newusers.
revision history:
2007 May : Changed title, updated some links
2005 Mar 9: Updated several links
2002 May 13: removed some dead links and adjusted posting frequency
2000 Sep 7: shortened subject because of some criticism & updated
two URLs
2000 Mar 24: add rfc1855 to section 5 & removed credit to Arnoud
1999 Jul 26: added htmlhelp mirrors & "covered" header
1999 Jun 7: changed "<URL:*>" into "*"
1999 Apr 9: updated WDG URLs, took over Stan Brown's web authoring links
1999 Mar 1: updated Stan Brown's URL(s)
1999 Jan 5: removed revision history from postings
1999 Jan 1: lowered posting frequency
1998 Oct 8: corrected error in section 1
1998 Sep 10: (belatedly) put in attributions to Stan Brown
1998 Aug 17: htmlhelp.org is reachable; redirects redirected
1998 Aug 14: htmlhelp.com is unreachable; redirect to stack.nl/htmlhelp/
1998 Aug 5: Supersedes info added
1998 Jun 15: added asp newsgroup
1998 Jun 2: added WDG's posting frequency
1998 May 8: now maintained by Boris Ammerlaan; HTML'ed <PRE> part
1997 Oct 6: add index to main WDG FAQs; redirect to the resurrected
htmlhelp.com
1997 Sep 21: htmlhelp.com is down; redirect to my copies
1997 Sep 14: add pointer to text version of WDG Authoring FAQ
1997 Sep 1: add pointer to news.announce.newusers
1997 Aug 30: add a second location for the charter
1997 Aug 27: add newsgroup charter (thanks, Galactus!)
also post this notice on the Web
1997 Aug 20: shift to Q&A format (thanks, JMJ, for the suggestion!)
1997 Aug 10: point to single-document version of Frames FAQ
1997 Jul 20: updated pointer to WDG FAQ; removed pointer to draft
revision since the revised copy has been published
1997 Jul 1: add pointer to Frequently Encountered problems list
1997 Jun 29: add pointer to draft revised WDG FAQ
1997 Jun 27: fix group name comp.lang.javascript
1997 Jun 23: Remove "other", which falsely implied that JavaScript
is a subset of Java; update posting frequency
1997 Jun 18: Add WDG frames FAQ, and where to post Java questions
1997 Jun 8: Add names of specific other groups
1997 Jun 6: Point out common kinds of off-topic questions.
1997 Jun 4: new article
http://www.stack.nl/~boris/HTML/ciwahfaq.html is the URL of this page.