Re: HTML+ and printed books
dcmartin@ckm.ucsf.edu (David C. Martin)
Message-id: <9305191702.AA23513@knowman.lib.ucsf.EDU>
From: dcmartin@ckm.ucsf.edu (David C. Martin)
Organization: UCSF Center for Knowledge Management
Email: dcmartin@ckm.ucsf.edu or uunet!dcmartin
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To: Dave_Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
Cc: www-talk@lib.ucsf.edu
In-reply-to: Your message of Wed, 19 May 93 12:19:26 +0000
<9305191119.AA11610@manuel.hpl.hp.com>
Subject: Re: HTML+ and printed books
Date: Wed, 19 May 93 10:01:40 MDT
Sender: dcmartin@lib.ucsf.edu
Well, just to throw my $0.02 into the works, I saw such a technique
utilized under Microsoft Cinemania. They used a broken underline vs. a
solid underline to indicate additional material directly related to the
document being browsed vs. another document. They used this distinction
to allow for document pop-up windows to display associated material
(e.g. footnotes).
I gather from your explanation that document components or "meta"
documents are needed to determine the scope of the material which should
be printed. I agree in principle, but would also like to present the
possibility of utilizing relevance ranking to determine the scope of
material received or printed, i.e. find document A, tell the system to
print, the system would locate all other documents "similar to" that
document and present them to you hierarchically (optionally) and then
allow you to trim the tree either explicity or implicitly (via
specifying a relevance cut-off).
Again, my $0.02.
dcm
--------
Dave_Raggett writes:
Tony Sanders writes:
>> 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 withprinted 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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