|
Posted by Eric Lindsay on December 17, 2005, 10:52 pm
Please log in for more thread options
> I have mixed feelings about that; XML on the web is doomed to be a
> failure alright, but XML _can_ help in the authoring process. The point
> is, most people 'using' XHTML don't use *any* XML tools at all, and it
> can't get worse beyond that.
I see your point. XML looks simple enough to write by hand, so the
temptation to do just that is always there. Even though I know tool
generation is the only way to go. I wonder whether that temptation to
hand adjust was in the minds of the Apple people when they changed some
of their XML files into binary (I'm pretty sure they only compressed the
files).
Somehow I never had the feeling that mainstream XML tools were readily
available to me, despite the odd magazine cover disk with Oxygen on it.
While listening to Bill Humphries talk about XML would enthuse me for a
time, actually using XML seemed just way too hard.
> And even with low(est)spec PHP 4 there's commonly some basic expat stuff
> that is useful for CMSing against hard rules (often without any
> further transformation support). Which can make XHTML useful even if
> you are stuck with it as 'the' output format (bogus XML compared to
> bogus SGML, really, dear kids, who actually cares?).
Looking around tonight, I happened to notice the Mac has textutil. The
text to html conversions it does seem to be valid, with an HTML 4.01
Strict Doctype. It didn't even do that bad a job when I fed it an HTML
file - kept most of the head, for instance, and the headers (did alas
throw away the URLs). Even the CSS isn't impossibly bad. Plus tidy is
already installed to work on the output. Most of the rest of my CMS is
just little scripts. A little loop to cat boilerplate files together
according to a pseudo make file, a few variables to change on the way
through. Curl and the html validator. Ftp with a here file. I guess
I'll see how far that will take me. Just prototyping at this stage
anyway.
> Oh dear. :) It's a bit dated (without hope) though.
> Tragically, PSGMLed Emacs is by far the best editor to actually learn
> HTML (or any old-fashioned supposedly DTD-based markup dialect) and at
> the same time widely unknown to the public.
On a more careful reading, the tutorial in which my comp sci lecturer
friend mentioned PSGML dates from 1995.
--
http://www.ericlindsay.com
| 
XML Sitemap