Re: [Bug-gnupedia] Re: submissions

[Bryce Harrington]

On 24 Jan 2001, Mike Warren wrote:

> David Tanzer <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > For the email submissions, the XML could be send in directly.
> > If we keep the structure simple, the XML format should
> > be patently obvious even to non-technical users, e.g.,
> > 
> > <author>Bill Green</author>
> > <title>An Overview of Flowering Plants</title>
> 
> Further to this, we can easily provide a template with all the
> potentially useful tags in it.

For things like bold, italics, etc., you could specify a specific way
for text documents to be followed, that make it easier to parse from.  
For example...

   *bold*
   _italic_
   =fixed font=
   --------   <-- separator line
   
   * List item
   * Three spaces, asterisk, space
      * Nested item (6 spaces)

   1. Ordered list
   2. Three spaces and a number

Etc.  The basic idea is that you can provide an easily parsed mechanism
for putting the formatting touches into an otherwise plain old text
document.  This way, for the body of the submission, your non-technical
users needn't put in a bunch of <TAG>'s everywhere</TAG>.  Of course,
advanced users could click a check box to turn this off, if they'd
rather submit documents in pure XML.

Just an idea...