Re: [Bug-gnupedia] Re: A Detailed Proposal - Mk I

[Imran Ghory]

On 19 Jan 2001, at 13:49, Simon Cross wrote:

> Poing!
> 
> With regards to my proposal Stan Seibert wrote:
> 
> > Excellent proposal, but I have one suggestion.  Since the article
> > will be in XML/HTML anyway, we can modify the DTD (I'd include
> > Schema here, but I don't know what XML Schema are..) to include a
> > tag just for encyclopedia article links.  For example, here is a
> > possible usage (paralleling your usage above):
> 
> > --- 
> > ...Blah, blah, blah... Oceanographers often go on excursions
> > tracking the movements of
> > <article articleserver="articleserver.gnu.org"
> >          authorserver="gnu-authors-reviewers.gnu.org"
> >          authorname="joesoap" articlename="whales" 
> >          articleversion="2.1">whales</article>
> > in the ocean.
> > ---
> 
> > Then this tag can be translated into a CGI call, direct link, or
> > whatever else makes sense to the conversion utility.
> 
> The problem I have with replacing the cgi-script call with an
> <article> tag is that this will mean the client (person reading the
> article) will be unable to check the digital signatures on the
> article.  When the article is sent to the client, the server will
> translate the <article> tags into links thus changing the text of the
> article and breaking the signatures.  

The server could also offer the ability to send you the article "raw" 
without processing so that you can check it by hand. This will also 
allow for other preprocessing to be done before the html is sent to 
the user.


> This raises the issue of wether the <article> tag should be called an
> <article> tag.  Perhaps <encyclopedia_object> tag would be a better
> name.  Maybe we should have different tags for different things, e.g.
> <article>, <image>, <video>, <audio>.

Or maybe <article text>, <article image>, etc. The <article> bit 
would allow the server to send to a function which will deal with the 
rest of the tag which defines what the data type is.

Imran