<disclaimer> My suggestions do not represent a desire to change or edit the content of the Dictionary in any way, but merely a desire to help the authors and copyright holders improve the experience of J users. My suggestions assume that the current definitive source of the Dictionary is HTML as published on the website - if that is not the case, then most of the rest of this post is probably irrelevant! </disclaimer>
It seems to me that it would be easier for Jsoftware, to maintain the Dictionary and automate its publication in various formats from a single definitive source, if the document was stored in a way that better separated structure and content from formatting. In the past separating structure and content from formatting was always a problem with HTML because web browsers had less-than-consistent handling of standards like CSS. As a result HTML tables were often used to provide a consistent experience across most browsers as they are currently in the Dictionary. Most modern browsers now support enough of these standards that it would be feasible to reformat the Dictionary while still maintaining a consistent web browser experience. I imagine that one of the reasons that this hasn't happened yet, is simply that the work to achieve this hasn't been a priority relative to other more substantive changes to J (and of course activities that actually generate revenue!). Hopefully some of the following will help ease the pain of moving to a new format. If not, I'll just put it down to experience! Anyway, I recently had a bit of time on my hands and had a bit of a tinker to see if I could re-create a page layout similar to that of the current J Dictionary using XHTML and CSS, rather than tables. If you are interested in having a look please check out the wiki page: http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/RicSherlock/J_Dictionary/CSS_Format/ I'm no HTML/CSS guru, so I'm sure that there are other, perhaps better, ways of doing this but I thought this might at least be a good starting point and get things kicked off. Assuming that an acceptable layout/format was found, can anyone recommend a way of automating the conversion more than just manually reformatting each page? I remember a forum post a while back suggesting that the xml/loose addon may be useful for converting old html to xml, could it be used in this case? Or perhaps HTML Tidy? I'm sure there will be a need for some manual tinkering to get things right, but hopefully at least some (preferably most!) of the process could be automated? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
