[Bug-gnupedia] just HTML??

[David Tanzer]

Tom Chance wrote:

> I've been talking to RMS who agrees that it would be best to
> keep it simple with HTML (not XML or other text
> display technologies), not only because it will work
> with any browser (even lynx!) but also because it will
> be easy to change into other formats should we wish
> to. Especially easy if we display with HTML
> (compatible) and save data with a database, not a
> large number of files.

This is is just an argument for using HTML for the presentation
format.  But it would be incredibly shortsighted to require that articles 
can only be submitted in HTML.  All that should be required for a 
submission format X is that there be a standardized way of converting X 
to HTML.

For example, it would very desirable to accept submissions in
Latex.  The latex source is much more intelligible than the HTML 
formatting commands into which it gets converted.  By posting
that source as part of the encyclopedia, the reusability and
modifiability of the document is greatly enhanced. 

Since XML is essentially HTML with some arbitrary restrictions
removed--whereas HTML has a fixed set of tags, XML
allows the author the freedom to use whatever tags are most
descriptive--it is more natural and flexible for human _writers_.  
The tagging allows that writers to add descriptive metadata,
and this makes the information reusable for new, unanticipated
applications in the future.  I.e., it lays the foundation for
the subsequent _querying_ of the encyclopedia. 

So with XML open to the writers (which includes HTML as
a subset), and HTML needed for the browsers, all that is needed
is a conversion script.  If authors choose to use their own
XML schema, we could ask that they send in the script that 
converts it to HTML.