At 16:32 09/01/2001 +0000, Gervase Markham wrote:
> > >Fine, but what has it to do with HTML coding guidelines to produce a
> > >consistent layout?
> >
> > Absolutely nothing I have very little interest in layout, but considerable
> > interest in content. I've said before to conflate the submission of
> > content with the delivery of content is wrong, the two are separate.
>
>Not if the same bit of software is dealing with both.
That's a basic mistake.
<forgetting the rest.... :-)>
>Do you really think we will find long-term volunteers to do the extremely
>tedious job of accepting documents in whatever forms you allow, converting
>them to this XML dialect, just to watch them get converted back to HTML
>again?
You've already had two volunteers and the display of documents has very
little to do with the management of the structure so I don't see why anyone
would care, that's a little like saying that database administrators have
their feelings hurt if someone produces a report. The work isn't lost, its
used.
>Simon, I don't want to be rude, but there is not a snowball's chance that
>we will go down this route. Among other criteria, we are looking for:
>
>1) Relative ease of deployment - everyone is busy
Using structured markup is no harder if the work is segmented
properly. Over time authors may learn the minimal amount of tags required
to structure their own documents but it isn't necessary. There are two
volunteers already.
>2) Low barriers to document contribution
Providing plain text seems a very low barrier, far lower than requiring the
use of a particular tool.
>3) Low maintenance
The maintenance of already tagged documents is certainly no worse than
using HTML and usually easier because the actual content is relatively intact.
I don't mind if you are rude :-). I've said before its a relatively low
level task to mark up plain text structurally. I wasn't particularly
nominating my off the cuff dialect much as I might find it appealing,
that's not at all important. I have been trying to emphasise that HTML,
whether strict or not is not a suitable form for contributing content and
structuring it in a logical fashion. After all that is what we have now
and the result is a mess, continuing in the same way will only produce a
different mess later on.
>It fails all of these. If I suggested to [EMAIL PROTECTED] that what
>www.mozilla.org needs is for us to write an entire document-handling
>system based around an invented XML dialect for document description,
>their reaction would be... interesting.
I haven't suggested anything like that and any way I think I've shown that
it meets all of the above criteria. You might think it entirely pointless
but as other documentation projects solve the same problems in similar
ways, as publishing generally works in a similar way with authors providing
content and someone else being responsible with how that content is laid
out and yet a third is used to provide indexing it might just be worth
thinking about.
This is a documentation project, not the management of a web site, the web
site is just one possible medium.
P.S. For some reason your machine thinks its the 9th :-)
Simon
>Gerv
===============================================
The more exotic the Project name the more ordinary the Product
S.P.L.
