PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide, Second Edition

Three Kinds of PQA

There are essentially three levels of complexity in PQAs, corresponding to the complexity of the Internet server with which they communicate.

Self-Contained

Although few people realize it, the PQA format is ideal for creating electronic documents that don’t connect to the Internet at all. Instead of using the Doc electronic-book format described in Chapter 10, consider creating a PQA for this purpose. The huge advantage is that, unlike plain-text Doc files, a PQA can contain pictures, a wide variety of text formatting, layout formatting such as tables and headers—and, best of all, hyperlinks. These links, in the form of buttons or underlined text, can link to other spots within the same document or even to other PQAs.

The CD-ROM accompanying this book contains two examples of these self- contained PQAs. The Guess PQA is a frivolous guessing game (see Figure 4.1). The DevPQA query application is this appendix itself in PQA form.

Figure D-1. The PQA format makes a terrific electronic document format, complete with graphics, formatting, links, and even some phony interactivity, as this guessing game demonstrates—even if you never go online.

WWW Links

Another kind of PQA can consist solely of links to the web, without much of a Palm VII-based form at all. This sort of document is like a Doc file that does nothing but retrieve information from the World Wide Web, instead ...