SEUL: Underlying tech/representation of the web page

[Ian Bicking <ian@chicagonet.net>]

I was thinking about how we want to author our pages.  I think you
all will agree that just writing everything in raw HTML is a bad
idea.

I don't have a lot of experience with this stuff.  I have used m4
in the past, but while it worked okay I wouldn't say it's great or
anything.

I think we should really try to make something that is software-
neutral.  m4 files depend on m4, php depends on php, dhtml depends
on Zope, etc.  But the transformations that turn the source into
formatted HTML isn't the hard part, it's making all the source
(content).  I think we should make something that is neutral of
the program(s) we use to transfer it to HTML.

For that reason, I think XML could be a good idea.  Something like
xtract <http://www.xmlscript.org> can do a transformation to HTML
pretty well, and I'm sure many new programs will show up in the
future.  With a good, fully semantic representation of the content
it will be useful for a long time without heroic efforts, allow
us to give it whatever look we want, including multiple looks in
case we can't decide.  XML seems a good semantic representation to
use.

Well, those are my thoughts.  Of course, even if we settle on XML
that's only the beginning, since we'd need to consider the what
tags to use... but that's another issue.


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| Ian Bicking                 |  bickiia@earlham.edu                |
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