On Tue, 30 Jan 2001, John BEPPU wrote:
> [ date ] 2001/01/30 | Tuesday | 01:50 PM
> [ author ] G.W. Haywood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> > > unfortunately, there is no easy way to derive a decent plain text
> > > version from an XML base...
> >
> > !!!??? That's just plain ridiculous.
>
> I agree. If there's going to be an HTML version of it somewhere
> along the line, couldn't a plain text version be done by doing
> something like:
>
> w3m -dump -T text/html < whatever.html > plaintext
>
> XML -> X?HTML -> plaintext
>
> right? Am I missing something?
Not at all. I guess I should have qualified it with a "using just XML
stylesheets". Both XSLT and XPathScript output the whitespace in a
document verbatim, which is a real pain for a plain text version. Yes I
can do either the above, or output POD, or output *roff. All of these are
totally possible, just more work, and we were only opening up the
possibility of having the digest as a link, not saying its going to
happen. But its less likely to happen the harder it is to do. Mailing a
link is easy, converting to a format that looks almost exactly like the
current version Geoff sends out is a bit harder (yes, I can spawn lynx,
which gets most of the way there, but its all coding that has to be done).
I mean, we're all web developers right? If you don't have a browser
running the majority of your day then something is seriously up (or you're
out of work :-). And we want the digest more widely viewed than just this
list - not everyone interested in mod_perl development subscribes here,
and take23 is the right forum to host the digest (IMHO).
If someone wants to do the work it takes to make Geoff's life easy for
generating the digest in both HTML and plain text then please volunteer
(and please don't volunteer unless you really mean it - we get lots of
volunteers for take23 work that barely ever turn out to be people who can
afford the time). But it has to be as easy as uploading one version, and
the take23 CMS automatically sending out an email to the list. Anything
else isn't worth it. And take23 uses XML, so bear that in mind (XHTML is
the format we're happiest with).
--
<Matt/>
/|| ** Director and CTO **
//|| ** AxKit.com Ltd ** ** XML Application Serving **
// || ** http://axkit.org ** ** XSLT, XPathScript, XSP **
// \\| // ** Personal Web Site: http://sergeant.org/ **
\\//
//\\
// \\
