Subject:
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Re: [faq FAQ How do I format an entry in the Lugnet FAQ?]
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.faq
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Date:
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Sun, 18 Jul 1999 01:21:12 GMT
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Viewed:
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5481 times
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In lugnet.faq, Robert Munafo writes:
> In lugnet.faq, Todd Lehman writes:
> > Wouldn't it be cool if there were something other than HTML that was
> > actually readable as plaintext but which also looked great when converted
> > to HTML?
>
> It's interesting you said that. For my own purposes (and this is unrelated
> to LUGNET) I've developed a few simple ASCII tags that I use in my web page
> source files. My web pages (on http://www.mrob.com/ ) are all typed in as
> plain ASCII text files. I use a fairly simple Perl script to convert them to
> HTML using the following rules:
Hee hee! COOL!
Say, I wonder if math-geeks have a strong natural affinity toward custom
tools like that? Why design a special tool and a custom markup when HTML
already exists? Answer: Because it's easy, more pleasant to work with for
lots of semi-complex body text, and hey, making up new special-purpose
notations from scratch (as appropriate) is just a way of life in mathematics,
so it's a perfectly normal thing to do.
> A bunch of characters with *asterisks* on either side is put into *italics*.
> Similarly, #sharp signs# become #boldface# and =equals signs= generate =H1
> style headers= (these are usually by themselves on a line).
What did you use for superscript and subscript? Those all come out so nicely
on your pages!
> [...snip...]
> If you were willing to use a method like this process the text, then you
> could make the submission format much simpler.
"It's interesting you said that." :-) Yes, I think a non-HTML text-markup
approach ("markup" isn't probably the right word, but...) would be a vast
imrovement over HTML for a number of reasons:
1. Safer, quicker, and easier to edit/maintain.
2. Much more directly readable as (doesn't require conversion to) plain text.
3. Better suited to quick-editing via HTML forms than HTML itself is.
4. Much easier for a casual (non-computergeek) user to learn.
Here are some related (and admittedly biased) thoughts on that general topic,
from another thread in another newsgroup earlier this month:
http://www.lugnet.com/admin/general/?n=1977
http://www.lugnet.com/admin/general/?n=1983
http://www.lugnet.com/admin/general/?n=2034 *
http://www.lugnet.com/admin/general/?n=2144
The big question is: Is something like that sufficiently powerful to handle
FAQ stuff...? And I think it is...at least for ~99% of anything anyone would
ever want to write.
The article marked with * above is the one which hints at "exciting related
possibilities with regard to FAQ lists." So yes, I would definitely be
willing to accept FAQ entries formatted in a special non-HTML format...but
it would need to be consistent with the member-page syntax (which is still
in the design and requirements cycle/phase). After realizing that FAQ entries
could actually be handled like that almost just as easily as any other text,
I made it a higher priority to be able to support FAQ entries. As an
experiment last week, I converted about half of the LDraw FAQ (locally) just
to see how far the approach could be taken with a relatively complex FAQ. I
think it shows a lot of promise.
I got a big smile on my face, BTW, when you wrote that your link syntax
used a vertical bar inside the brackets to separate the URL portion from the
visible human-text portion,
[Robert Munafo's Home Page|www.mrob.com]
because I was thinking of the exact same character (only with reversed left &
right portions):
<www.mrob.com|Robert Munafo's Home Page>
(Vertical-bar seemed like the only logical choice.)
Anyway, I was talking (writing) with my sister a few days ago about the link
sub-syntax, and just after I'd sent one of the mails, I noticed something
problematic about the vertical-bar character...
If something is written as:
<http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/5_BNF.html|Uniform Resource Locators:BNF>
then, even though | (vline) isn't part of a valid URL, Netscape mail (and
likely MSOE as well) displays everything up through the end of the word
"Uniform" as a hyperlink. It's certainly an unfortunate bug in Netscape's
mail reader, but for practical reasons on those grounds, it's really worth
considering something other than | as the separator (for this LUGNET purpose).
So what other characters are good options? Other illegal characters like \
and ^ are likely to have the same problems, but -- there is always the space
character! :-)
<http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/5_BNF.html Uniform Resource Locators:BNF>
Although a space is somewhat less "clean" and less readable than |, it has the
advantage that the text-line can be auto-wrapped more nicely by typical text
editors,
<http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/5_BNF.html
Uniform Resource Locators:BNF>
which might be more pleasant in long lists of arbitrarily URLs. (And the
text-to-HTML converter of course simply trims leading space from the human-
readable portion of the link.)
As for the other parts, my sister is in the process of convincing me not to use
[[Foo]] and [[[Foo]]] for headings but instead to use
Foo foo foo
===========
and
Foo foo foo
-----------
since those are more intuitive both to read and to write (especially to read).
The idea of using -'s and ='s comes from the 'txt2html' tool which Tim Rueger
pointed out:
http://www.lugnet.com/admin/general/?n=2097
There's also a huge list of plaintext-to-HTML filters at W3:
http://www.w3.org/Tools/Misc_filters.html
--Todd
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Message has 3 Replies:
 | | URL characters
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| (...) Gulp, I made the same mistake in my URL detection code on the web interface here. Just tightened up the set of allowable characters a bit and regression tested...much better now. BTW, I'm consciously going against what W3 says about the ~ (...) (25 years ago, 18-Jul-99, to lugnet.faq, lugnet.admin.general)
| | | Re: [faq FAQ How do I format an entry in the Lugnet FAQ?]
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| (...) I should also point out that I have an almost pathological affinity for using ASCII when about 99.5 % of the sane world would use graphics. For example, see: (URL) actually wrote general-purpose code for converting bitmap images of line art (...) (25 years ago, 21-Jul-99, to lugnet.faq)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: [faq FAQ How do I format an entry in the Lugnet FAQ?]
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| (...) It's interesting you said that. For my own purposes (and this is unrelated to LUGNET) I've developed a few simple ASCII tags that I use in my web page source files. My web pages (on (URL) ) are all typed in as plain ASCII text files. I use a (...) (25 years ago, 15-Jul-99, to lugnet.faq)
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