> Pardon me for butting in (I've only been on the list for a few days, now) but
> has anyone brocahed the idea of compiled html docs? I feel that at some
>point,
> HTML developers will want to have the source code for their pages compiled
> into a format which will make them somewhat less duplicatable by others.
>
> Any thoughts?
Funny, I don't think of myself as an HTML developer. The term feels funny.
Web Author is more like it. I don't see any reason to want to make pages
less duplicatable. The emphasis is on the content displayed not the
generating process. Without if statements and other control structures,
there's nothing in an HTML document to hide. And even if you could, any
competent Web author can reverse engineer the equivalent source from the
display.
There are, IMO, a couple of good reasons to keep the source readily
available. 1) Authors improve their skills quickly by copying techniques
from each other, and, in the process, the overall quality of the Web
increases in a consistent manner. 2) Having open HTML source makes it easy
to write robots, worms, spiders and other intelligent agents that can surf
the Web on our behalf building indexes and databases.
Larry Aronson <laronson@acm.org>
http://www.interport.net/%7Elaronson/Homepage.html