A FAQ is the nickname for a "Frequently Asked Questions" document. There are thousands of FAQs available on the World Wide Web on many different topics. The basic format of a FAQ is that someone asks a question, and someone else answers.

FAQs were very popular on specialist bulletin boards, mailing lists and USENET newsgroups. On these discussion forums, the same questions appear repeatedly: newbies ask the same questions and new approaches to solving problems get developed. These questions and answers are collected into FAQs; newbies can be directed to the FAQs for good answers, and the FAQs can get updated.

In several cases, FAQs are ultimately revised into book form and published in paper: The SGML FAQBook by Steve DeRose and Chinese Japanese Korean Vietnamese Information Processing by Ken Lunde are both examples of FAQs in book form.

You can find a good collection of FAQs at the web site of faq.org (http://www.faq.org/).

A markup language lets you name the various elements in your text: HTML is the most famous markup language. You just insert special codes called tags into your text; these tags tell you where each interesting element starts or finishes.

The term markup was coined by Dr Charles Goldfarb at IBM in the early 1970s. Goldfarb invented SGML, the Standard Generalized Markup Language (Internation Standard 8879:1986) which is now becoming available over the WWW as XML, the Extensible Markup Language.

QAML is a markup language created specially to help write, use and maintain FAQs. It is smaller and simpler than HTML.

A QAML document has a very simple structure: it has a head and a body. The body is made up of qna elements, each of which has a q question and a answer.

Because the questions and answers are clearly marked up by tags, it makes life a lot easier for people to write programs to manipulate the FAQ: to automatically generate indexes of questions, to make global changes to stylesheets, or to split the questions and answers into different pages.

QAML version 1.0 was written by Justin Higgens, of faq.org. Email jhiggins@dn.net. This version used SGML, and so is very lenient on tagging errors.

QAML version 2.0 uses XML, and so you need to be more careful with providing all the tags needed for a well-formed XML document. It has very full support for the latest World Wide Web Consortium specifications (see http://www.w3.org). It was written by Rick Jelliffe, of the Academia Sinica Computing Center, Taipei, Taiwan.

HTML is much more complicated and richer than QAML. However, HTML allows you to create documents which look pretty but which do not have the tagging needed to create indexes or to convert the data to different forms: it gives you too much!

FAQ documents can be accessed from all sorts of systems, not only visual web browsers. So QAML does not provide the types of elements which cannot be seen on many different media: telnet terminals, Braille readers, speech synthesizers, mobile phones, etc.

However, it is very easy to convert QAML to HTML. There are XSL stylesheets available to do this. So you can write your FAQ in QAML, but deliver it in HTML.

You can use any text editor, or SGML or HTML editor. The NotePad or WordPad applications allow it. You can use most word processors (but remember to save the document as "Text". You can even use a WYSIWYG HTML editor to create the FAQ, and then use a text editor to alter the element type names and attributes as appropriate.

There is also an OmniMark script available which does automates much of the HTML-to-QAML conversion work.

A QAML document has a very simple structure: it has a head and a body.

The head has to have some metadata which gives the title, the maintainers name and email contact address, the official archive site for the FAQ, and keywords which can be given to a search robot.

The body is made up of qna elements, each of which has a q question and a answer. These qna elements can be collected into sections, and given general section titles.

Within each answer, you can have p paragraph elements. The only element types allowed inside a paragraph are link and span.

There are CSS and XSL stylesheets available from Academia Sinica Computing Centre's Chinese XML Now! project, at http://www.ascc.net/xml/en/utf-8/resource-index.html

The link element has an attribute called href. Just put in the URL of the resource that is the link's target.

Remember that the data inside the link should also contain the URL. This is because some people may read the FAQ from a paper printout. Don't forget them!

An example follows.

<p>This is <link href="qaml-faq.xml">qaml-faq.xml</link></p>

(Some WWW browsers may display that example wrong, so another version of the same thing follows: the one with the angle brackets is the correct one.)

This is qaml-faq.xml

( To be written )

( To be written )

Standards are very useful, because they allow us to build amazing things co-operatively.

But a standard is usually general purpose, and a general-purpose tool is usually sub-optimal than a custom-made, specific-purpose tool. So QAML is better for representing FAQs than HTML, but your own markup language will be even better for marking up your own FAQ.

But if you make your own markup language, you have to also then write all your own computer tools to use it. However, QAML is very simple, so even if you do have your own markup language for FAQs, you may find it is not difficult to export your information into QAML format, so that you can use any QAML tools. Or you may find you can convert QAML tools for your requirements too!

XML is the Extensible Markup Language. It is a simple syntax for constructing markup languages to exchange data over the WWW. QAML 2.0 documents are XML documents. (And XML documents are SGML documents.)

See http://www.w3.org/ for more details.

I18n is the contraction used to mean "internationalization", because there are 18 letters missing.

I18n means the features available to allow documents in different languages, perhaps even within the same document.

QAML 2.0 is highly internationalized, following WWW best practise. (One of QAML 2.0's authors is a member of the World Wide Web Consortium's I18n Interest Group, and proposed most of the i18n features of XML.) It currently does not have support for bi-directional text; this can be added on request.

QAML 2.0 documents can use any standard character encoding, and all elements can have an attribute xml:lang to give the language being used.

Accessability means that the document can be read by people on unusual mediums or formats: large magnifaction screens, speech synthesizers, Braille readers and so on.

QAML has been written following the World Wide Web Consortium guidelines in this area: elements with vision-dependencies have kept out, and logo images must have alternative forms.

The Dublin Core is a basic set of 13 elements which various experts have decided are a minimum useful list for capturing basic metadata about small documents on the Web. This metadata allows searching by users and rudamentary classification by librarians.

The QAML DTD (Document Type Definition) shows the mappings to the various Dublin Core elements. Also, we encourage the use of a final section, with class dc, with explicit markup of the Dublin Core elements. This assists users of printed versions of your FAQ.

For more information on Dublin Core, there is a small QAML FAQ on Metadata at http://www.ascc.net/xml/en/utf-8/dc-fq.xml.