Re: making old text publicly available on the web

Paul Ramsey (pramsey@postmodern.com)
Thu, 6 Jul 95 08:42:22 PDT

If you're not going to mark these documents up why not just leave them as
raw documents and make the browsers better at displaying raw text documents.
I can even imagine browsers that were capable of enhancing certain types
of text documents (C source code for instance) without any markup. People
have been trying to figure out how to display all sorts of things ever since
we started using CRTs. We should probably not throw out everything we've
learned just because we have started using hypertext.

By the way, until we modify the existing browsers it would be simple enough
to write a filter which converted text documents with form feeds in it into
separate html documents with "next page"/"previous page" buttons at the bottom.
It could also include page numbers.

Paul Ramsey