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Date:Mon Sep 19 09:18:04 2003 
Subject:Re: help system - ideas wanted 
From:Chris Dollin 
Volume-ID:1030919.04 

x wrote:

> I would use marked up text, either xml or xhtml. Providing a filter to
> remove the tags is straight-forward. Styling via a set of standard
> cascading style sheets (CSS) would then give you a specific look and
> feel.

I think this is a dreadful idea; those languages are *not* convenient
to write. And XML isn't "marked up text", even though that's its
historical origin - the pointy-bracket structure is fundamental to
an XML document, rather than being mere decoration.

> I think it is preferable to mark text using an acceptable standard to
> say that a line is a heading, than to invent yet another proprietary
> approach based on arbitrary conventions.

It's not "proprietary", which is to do with ownership and payment and
stuff. It's just local and non-standard. 

I think it's more important that it be easy to write and read. We can
turn it into a sea of machine-readable angle-brackets using a computer.
 
> It is a lot easier to retain the text in a tagged format, provided you
> chose a very prominent standard, and manipulate it to generate the
> content you want, on the fly, than to try to generate sophisticated
> structured content, on the fly, from a plain-text that follows arbitrary
> stylistic conventions.

It's just code. I don't see a problem with writing the translator from
markup-that-isn't-XML to structured-text-that-might-be-XML, mostly because
I've done it several times already. I do know that I find reading HTML
(even more so, XML) painful.

-- 
Chris "electric hedgehog" Dollin
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