Re: HTML todo list

Thomas A. Fine (fine@cis.ohio-state.edu)
Tue, 12 Jan 93 16:42:55 -0500


>
>>> In http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/List.html
>>> 4. HTML should support QUESTION and RESPONSE elements to
>>> support converting USENET FAQ's to HTML
>>
>>Not sure about that one. Ther are several ways of mapping FAQs onto
>>HTML as it is ... I would prefer to see for example a MENU of
>>questions, each linked to the answer in a separate document which had
>>its question as for example a H1 heading and TITLE.
>
>Well then maybe the USENET FAQ project needs a separate DTD. I'm
>willing to table the issue for now.

I'm perfectly happy using existing HTML to format the FAQs. I wrote perl
scripts that convert the comp.unix.questions and comp.lang.perl FAQs
into hypertext. They were done just as a proof of concept, go get an
idea of what it would look like. They are available at
"http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu:80/hypertext/information/information.html"

(This address is subject to change)

I'd also like to express the opinion that we shouldn't make the HTML so
terribly specific. Every new situation shouldn't require another addition
to HTML. If that were the case, we'd never be finished.

>[...] The same is true for newlines: it's
>illegal to treat
><foo>
>content
></foo>
>different from <foo>content</foo> because the difference is
>not reported by the parser (unless we do some shortref magic
>to force the parser to report the difference.)

I don't think we should do any shortref magic. The simplest thing
(the way it works now) is that the two examples above are identical.
I say this is fine. If someone wants to stick a new-line in at the
beginning of some section, they can just stick it in there:

<foo>

content
</foo>

tom