>> Has much thought gone into features needed to have data be both online
>> and used to print books. When you are using a hypertext browser you
>> want one view of the data and when you print a book you'll need another.
Dale Dougherty replies:
> My sense is that this is really too big a problem to be handled
> at the HTML-level. At some point, we have to distinguish between
> a DTD such as Docbook used to maintain information for
> multiple purposes and a DTD like HTML used primarly for delivery.
I would be really interested in having a look at the Docbook DTD,
and some of the background assumptions and motivation for this work.
Can you give me a pointer to where I can get further information?
When viewing an HTML document, I find it a common experience to want
to print out part of the web, not just this particular document.
Supporting a model of how retrievable chunks form a larger whole would
permit this. Furthermore, it would permit authors to exploit peoples
familiarity with printed material as an additional navigation model
to basic hypertext. Authors will need to bear in mind that the documents
will also be read on paper media, and avoid reference to clicking etc.
For this reason, I am currently studying how we could represent such
models effectively in HTML+, and analysing a wide variety of fiction,
reference books, magazines, newspapers and technical documentation.
The guiding principles are:
o superset of the current HTML DTD
o presentation independance (no style info)
o easy/fast to process with modest programs
o offline compilation of indexes/contents
o support the needs of a wide as possible
range of on-line and printed material
The results so far are very encouraging. Provided you don't mind seeing
work at an early and incomplete stage, you may be interested in looking
at "ftp://hplose.hpl.hp.com/pub/dtd2.html". I would be very interested
in collaborating on this work.
Best wishes,
Dave Raggett,
p.s. Tony, I am including change bars in the draft proposal for HTML+
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