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Re: [Bug-gnupedia] Design proposal

From: Jimmy Wales
Subject: Re: [Bug-gnupedia] Design proposal
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 18:16:07 -0600
User-agent: Mutt/1.2i 
Mike Warren wrote:
> Tom Chance <address@hidden> writes:
> > Plus of course if we swapped systems, they'd have to be compatible
> > or easily interchangeable. 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.
> 
> How do you encode ``author'' (etcetera) in HTML?

You can't, of course.

Certainly, the web pages should be rendered in extremely simple HTML.
(I'm personally even opposed to javascript, which I think is mostly evil,
but that's another disucssion.)  The website should work with any
browser.

But it's another story altogether when we think about the "canonical"
version of the articles.  It is easy to go from XML->HTML, but almost
impossible (labor intensive) to do the opposite.   And the reason is
precisely what Mike has identified -- you can't encode the same information
in any useful way.

If you have XML files, then you can easily encode
<article>
        <title>My Article</title>
        <author>Some Person</author>
        <body>blah blah blah</body>
        <otherstuff>blah blah blah</otherstuff>
</article>

And you can even have (a little bit of) structural html in the <body>
(for example, prefer <em> over <i>, etc.)

The alternative is to do it all in html, which is an unparseable mess.

--------
<h1>My Article</h1>
<h2>By: Some Person</h2>

<p>blah blah blah</p>
--------

Yuck.

--Jimbo

p.s. As to the question of XML versus db, I think that's a question worth
thinking about, but not because there is an answer.  It's worth thinking about
just to make it clear that it isn't a question of XML _versus_ db at all.  db
is how you store and access stuff.  XML is an interchange/markup format.  XML
is not a database, and a database is not XML.  So there's a role for both, I
think.

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