RE: [Bug-gnupedia] Formatting.

[Duncan Lock]

        This should be self explanatory with some XML coding experience. It
contains a section for authors, a section for reviewers and thier reviews, a
section for copyleft type stuff and the content of the article.

        Thoughts?

Dunc

Suggested internal article format:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml:stylesheet rel="stylesheet" type="text/xsl"
href="article-stylesheet.xsl" ?>

<article>
        <authors>
                <author>
                        <name></name>
                        <email></email>
                        <wwwurl></wwwurl>
                        <digital-signature></digital-signature>
                </author>
                ...
        </authors>
        <version>
                <number></number>
                <created-on></created-on>
                <last-updated></last-updated>
        </version>
        <reviews>
                <reviewer>
                        <name></name>
                        <email></email>
                        <wwwurl></wwwurl>
                        <digital-signature></digital-signature>
                        <date-of-review></date-of-review>
                        <review>
                        </review>
                </reviewer>
                ...
        </reviews>
        <copyleft></copyleft>
        
        <content>
        
        </content>
</article>

-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden
Behalf Of Andy Fletcher
Sent: 17 January 2001 4:14
To: address@hidden
Subject: [Bug-gnupedia] Formatting.


Hope that I am not repeating too much of what has already been said.

Formatting of submissions
====================
We need to come up with a standard format for submissions so that
crossreferences, keywords, authors etc. can be clearly identified.
A consistant look and feel for the encyclopedia will only come about if we
do that.

We also need to come up with a standard format early on so that we do not
get a massive pile of submissions which have to be reworked.

XML is definitely the way to go from the viewpoint of the backend as it
allows the data to be structured and indexed in an easy way. If the
submissions are in HTML then finding all articles posted by a certain
person could be very difficult. In XML you just check the author tag. Same
principle applies for other fields.

>From the viewpoint of the author XML can be a big pain when the validator
keeps chucking the submissions out. It is also not easy for the non-techie
to get into.

The solution is to first define and agree an XML DTD/Schema for submissions
with author tags/image links etc (we also have to consider how to assign
reference IDs for images).  Review comments could be inserted within
predefined elements at the end of the XML document. Once this is done a
webpage can be created with a forms/file-upload presentation.  When the
user clicks on the submit button the CGI script then creates the XML
document and submits it into the system.  There are Perl modules which will
do exactly this.

We can also define a mapping from a flat text file with keywords to the XML
format which looks for strings like "$Author: $ or even Groff source if
someone is mad enough.

Generating the displayed web pages is really simple if we do not try to get
too clever. At the simplest level we could convert all XML elements to <p>
or the equivalent with a class <p class="author"> when serving them from
the webserver.

I can come up with an XML template if it would help the discussion. The
important thing at this stage is to be rigorous with the document formats,
if we are not then there could be a lot of work in the future.

Does any of this help the discussion ?

Andy

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