dive into mark

This is more for my benefit than for yours. If I don’t write this down, I’ll forget it.

• Dive Into Python was first published in October of 2000, at www.geocities.com/~mpilgrim/. It was originally envisioned as a short tutorial for my co-workers, but after the first weekend of writing, I decided I wanted to keep the copyright so I could license it under the GNU Free Documentation License, because free software deserves free documentation. I had never written a book before. I had never written anything longer than a term paper. I had no experience in technical writing.

  Dive Into Python was, and still is, written using Emacs, in DocBook XML, a free DTD for technical writing. I chose DocBook because I was under the impression that a friend of mine who was a technical writer used it and swore by it. She later confessed that she had never learned it, and was quite surprised that I had. I had never used XML before. I had never used XSL before. I had never used Emacs before.

  The home page of Dive Into Python validates as HTML 4.01 Strict, but most of the inner pages do not validate, even as HTML 4.01 Transitional, due to my use of IMG tags within a PRE section. This problem will not be solved until all major browsers support the whitespace:pre CSS property. (Internet Explorer didn’t support it until version 6, so this will be a while.)

• In December of 2000, Dive Into Python was moved to its own domain, diveintopython.org. I had never registered a domain name before. I had never created a public web site before.

• dive into mark was originally published in July of 2001, at diveintopython.org/mark/. It was powered by a homegrown Python script which was strikingly similar to the later Blosxom in design and spirit. Entries were edited in a text editor and saved as plain text files, then applied to a variety of templates to generate the home page, archive pages, calendars, and RSS feeds. The original templates were CSS-based and validated as XHTML 1.0 Strict.

  dive into mark was originally envisioned as a work-in-progress page of my work on Dive Into Python. I quickly discovered that I wasn’t doing enough work on it to warrant a work-in-progress page, but there was a whole lot of other interesting stuff to write about.

• In September of 2001, dive into mark was moved to its own subdomain, diveintomark.weblogger.com, where it was powered by Manila, a commercial content management system by UserLand Software. This move was precipitated by three things: my writings on addiction, which I wanted to separate from my book; my interest in XML-RPC, which Manila supported; and my desire to use Google Free Web search to provide site search for both the book and the weblog, which only works if they’re on separate domains.

  Since Manila didn’t support defining external stylesheets, and weblogger.com didn’t (at the time) have the Filer plug-in installed that allowed a Manila user to upload and link to arbitrary files, I downgraded to a simple table-based layout in order to support Netscape 4. It validated as HTML 4.01 Transitional, the highest level Manila supported (due to auto-generated markup for the calendar and meta tags).

• In January of 2002, dive into mark was moved to its own domain, diveintomark.org, where it was powered by Greymatter, an open source publishing tool by Noah Grey. I went back to an all-CSS layout, and modified one line of Greymatter’s source code that was preventing my pages from validating as XHTML 1.0 Strict.

• In March of 2002, dive into mark was migrated to Movable Type, a free-for-personal-use (but not open source) publishing system by Ben and Mena Trott, which it still runs. It briefly validated as XHTML 1.1, until I discovered unresolvable conflicts with Bobby and bumped it back down to XHTML 1.0 Strict.

• Dive Into OS X was first published in March of 2002, at diveintomark.org/osx/. It was written in DocBook XML, like Dive Into Python, and published as a set of static files in HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, and plain text formats. I used the same tool chain as I used for Dive Into Python, which, for reasons that are too arcane to go into, only ran under Windows.

  Dive Into OS X grew out of questions I researched for the students in the OS X Administration Basics and Server Essentials classes, which I taught, and still teach, for Apple (through a subcontractor). I had never taught professionally before. Before my train the trainer course, I had never stood in front of a roomful of strangers.

• In April of 2002, Dive Into OS X was moved to diveintoosx.org and reborn as a wiki, powered by MoinMoin, a GPL Python-based wiki implementation. The source code was heavily customized to generate valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional pages.

• Dive Into Accessibility was originally published in serial form on dive into mark, one day at a time, starting in June of 2002, under the name 30 days to a more accessible weblog. Other than my own weblog, I had never created an accessible web site before. I had never used a screen reader. I did, however, know a guy named Marcus about ten years ago; he really was blind, he really did work in an AT+T Relay Center, and he really did use a refreshable Braille display to do his job.

• In July of 2002, Dive Into Accessibility was moved to its own domain, diveintoaccessibility.org and relicensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It is also powered by Movable Type.

Yesterday, I found this nestled in a comment at the end of the XML source of Dive Into Python:

As I write this, the year is 2000, and the Internet is a battleground of intellectual property disputes. Some people would like you to believe that, without proper financial incentives, music, literature, and computer software would disappear. After all, who would make music if they can’t make money on it? Who would write? Who would program? I know the answer. The answer is that musicians will make music, not because they can make money, but because musicians are the people who can’t not make music. Writers will write because they can’t not write. I’ve been programming for 16 years, writing free software for 8. I can’t imagine not doing this. If you can imagine yourself not doing what you’re doing, do something else. Do whatever it is that you can’t not do.