dive into mark

Brian Donovan: Who dropped the dead cat in the well?

The bottom line : if you’re in this web game for the long haul, then you need to avoid poisoning your content with HTML …

For what it’s worth, a more future proof way (the specifics would vary, of course) of achieving the same result might sound a little like this : store articles/posts as collections of chunks of content. In addition to information binding it to a specific article and indicating its place in the sequence of chunks for that article, all sorts of information could be associated with each content fragment – including a flag indicating that that piece of content is a text quote from another source, a url for the source (if available), etc. When the time came to build the pages, the cms could put the chunks together to build articles and, noting that a particular chunk of a particular article was actually a quoted passage, wrap it in a CITE element and append a link to the source (if available).

There are hidden costs that you’re not acknowledging:

1. This requires a content management system. I don’t have one. I have Movable Type. It’s free. It works. It lets me write stories.
2. This ties you to your content management system. The further removed your raw data is from your published form, the harder it will be to migrate away from the tools that convert one to the other.
3. Maintaining those scripts that convert your pure data to your display data is much more work than you think.

I wrote Dive Into Python in DocBook XML, and I maintain a set of XSLT scripts to convert the raw XML into HTML, PDF, Word, HTMLHelp, and plain text. Actually, my scripts are just customizations of larger, more complex scripts maintained by Norman Walsh. Overall, I’ve spent more time maintaining those scripts that I have writing the book. But my content is pure! Was it worth it? No, not really. Mostly I ended up using HTML as an intermediate format anyway, so a semantic HTML source document and a few well-placed regular expressions would have served my purposes just as well. In fact, this is what I did to produce the PDF version of Dive Into Accessibility.

But since you mention quotations…

Posts by quotation. Auto-generated from the little-used cite attribute of the BLOCKQUOTE and Q elements. Let the maelstrom begin.

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