20.4.1. Some sections are in outline form
- like this
- with fragments of ideas and points
- with incomplete sentences
- and with lists of points that are obviously only starting
points for more complete analyses
20.4.2. Other sections are written in more complete essay form, as
reasonably self-contained analyses of some point or topic.
Like this. Some of these essays were taken directly out of
posts I did for the list, or for sci.crypt, and no
attribution H (since I wrote the stuff...quotes from others
are credited).
20.4.3. The styles may clash, but I just don't have the hundreds of
hours to go through and "regularize" everything to a
consistent style. The outline style allows additional points,
wrinkles, rebuttals, and elaborations to be grafted on easily
(if not always elegantly). I hope most readers can understand
this and learn to deal with it.
20.4.4. Of course, there are places where the points made are just
too fragmentary, too outlinish, for people to make sense of.
I've tried to clean these up as much as I can, but there will
always be some places where an idea seemed clear to me at the
time (maybe not) but which is not presented clearly to
others. I'll keep trying to iron these kinks out in future
versions.
20.4.5. Comment on style
- In many cases I merged two or more chunks of ideas into one
section, resulting in many cases in mismatching writing
styles, tenses, etc. I apologize, but I just don't have the
many dozens of hours it might take to go through and
"regularize" things, to write more graceful transition
paragraphs, etc. I felt it was more important to get the
ideas and idea fragments out than to polish the writing.
(Essays written from scratch, and in order, are generally
more graceful than are concatenations of ideas, facts,
pointers, and the like.)
- Readers should also not assume that a "fleshed-out"
section, made up of relatively complete paragraphs, is any
more important than a section that is still mostly made up
of short one-liners.
- References to Crypto Journals, Books. Nearly every section
in this document _could have_ one or more references to
articles and papers in the Crypto Proceedings, in
Schneier's book, or whatever. Sorry, but I can't do this.
Maybe someday--when true hypertext arrives and is readily
usable (don't send me e-mail about HTML, or Xanadu, etc.)
this kind of cross-referencing will be done. Footnotes
would work today, but are distracting in on-line documents.
And too much work, given that this is not meant to be a
scholarly thesis.
- I also have resisted the impulse to included quotes or
sections from other FAQs, notably the sci.crypt and rsadsi
FAQs. No point in copying their stuff, even with
appropriate credit. Readers should already have these docs,
of course.
20.4.6. quibbling
- Any time you say something to 500-700 people, expect to
have a bunch of quibbles. People will take issue with
phrasings, with choices of definitions, with facts, etc.
Correctness is important, but sometimes the quibbling sets
off a chain reaction of corrections, countercorrections,
rebuttals, and "I would have put it differently"s. It's all
a bit overwhelming at times. My hope for this FAQ is that
serious errors are (of course) corrected, but that the List
not get bogged down in endless quibbling about such minor
issues as style and phrasing.
By Tim May, see README
HTML by Jonathan Rochkind