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Hiya,
Here are a few details on LUGNET member pages... Nothing in just stone yet,
but that's why this is being posted. Looking for opinions on how useful
this sounds to you...
--
Member pages on LUGNET will initially be text-based. Someday if we ever
have a herd of servers and infinite bandwidth and a room full of lawyers,
maybe we could do a full real hosting kind of thing like geocities does,
where you get a big hunk of disk space for whatever HTML and images you want
to throw up... But for the forseeable horizon, text-only is the way to go.
But that's OK, because places like geocities and tripod, etc. give all of
that for free, and you can always just link to those.
The jist of LUGNET member pages: Encapsulate the following voluntarily
contributed information in a more permanent venue than news:
- personal info/bios
- stories/creative writing
- rants/spews
- lists of sites, with or without commentary
- organized or unorganized hyperlinked information
- want lists/trade lists/etc.
- etc.
To me, at first this sounds most useful to someone who doesn't yet have a
real homepage than to someone who does, but there are a couple nice things
here with this, even for old hands, because you don't have to compose pages
using HTML:
1. It'll be super-easy to update content. Much easier than editing
HTML. And it's an edit-live methodology -- you click an edit button
and make changes in a form box, and click Submit, and presto! the
changes are instantly made.
2. The markup methods (the stuff that modifies plain text to make
special text) aren't HTML but something much simpler, easier to
learn, and much less error prone.
3. It'll be super-easy to make hyperlinks to other pages and have those
links automatically displayed as titles rather than pure URLs. That
is, if you give a URL http://www.snorb.org/gorch.html, then the link
won't show up as that URL, but instead as "Snorb's Fine Gorches."
(This won't happen 100% magically, but in many cases it will. The
more links the system learns over time, the more titles it can show
automatically).
4. 90% or more of all the text that gets typed this way will probably
end up being personal pages, but some of it will go into common,
shared areas which represent a group or hierarchy, etc. -- for
example, the .trains group might want to maintain a helpful intro
page or pages for people who stop by at the /trains/ URL.
Anyway, I wanted to toss out some ideas on the syntax (markup) for the text,
because even though it'll be text-only, it doesn't always have to be purely
boring plain text.
--
Other than HTML, three or four popular text-markup systems come to mind.
I'm not sure where they all came from, but for one reason or another they
have stood out in my mind over the years.
The Not-HTML The Corresponding HTML Comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
See I<Spot> run. See <I>Spot</I> run. italics
See B<Spot> run. See <B>Spot</I> run. boldface
See I<B<Spot>> run. See <I><B>Spot</B> run</I>. italics & boldface
SECT<Spot Drinks Blood> <H3>Spot Drinks Blood</H3> section header
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
See \i{Spot} run. See <I>Spot</I> run. italics
See \b{Spot} run. See <B>Spot</I> run. boldface
See \i{\b{Spot} run}. See <I><B>Spot</B> run</I>. italics & boldface
\sect{Spot Drinks Blood} <H3>Spot Drinks Blood</H3> section header
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
See (i Spot) run. See <I>Spot</I> run. italics
See (b Spot) run. See <B>Spot</I> run. boldface
See (i (b Spot) run). See <I><B>Spot</B> run</I>. italics & boldface
(sect Spot Drinks Blood) <H3>Spot Drinks Blood</H3> section header
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
See ''Spot'' run. See <I>Spot</I> run. italics
See '''Spot''' run. See <B>Spot</I> run. boldface
-n/a- See <I><B>Spot</B> run</I>. italics & boldface
'''Spot Drinks Blood''' <H3>Spot Drinks Blood</H3> section header
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
I think all of those have been proven usable in real-world applications, but
none of them gets me very excited for the purpose of member pages. They're
either not intuitive enough, or too structured. So I'm thinkin' something
more like this:
The Not-HTML The Corresponding HTML Comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
See {Spot} run. See <I>Spot</I> run. italics
See [Spot] run. See <B>Spot</I> run. boldface
See {[Spot] run}. See <I><B>Spot</B> run</I>. italics & boldface
[[Spot Drinks Blood]] <H3>Spot Drinks Blood</H3> section header
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
The reason I like it is because it seems intuitive, friendly, relatively
easy to type, and because normal text rarely uses [, ], {, }, <, and >.
Now, what's shown above there is only { } and [ ] ... That leaves < > for
hyperlinks!
I'm thinking it ought to be possible to write things like
Foo foo foo blah blah blah <http://www.snorb.org/gorch.html> wubba wubba
and
Foo foo foo </loc/dk/> blah blah blah
and
Foo foo foo <gonk> blah blah blah
and let the server do all the hard work of figuring out what to actually
display for those. In the first case, it would know (because someone has
already told it, or it would ask you) what the gorch.html page on
www.snorb.org is. In the second case, that's a server-relative URL, so it
would just go fetch the name of that page -- Danmark (Denmark) the country,
since that is the server-local URL of the lugnet.loc.dk newsgroup homepage.
In the third case, that's a directory-relative URL, and it would refer to
another page named "gonk" in the member's personal-page directory.
(By the way, the use of [], {}, and <> as markup characters doesn't
necessarily preclude them from being used in bodies of text. If they ever
really are needed, they could be written easily enough using so-called
"escape" sequences -- \[, \], \{, \}, \<, and \>. And then of course \\
means \, but that's relatively advanced given the most common compositions
of text.)
Other than that, there's not really much needed, except lists and maybe some
kind of block-quote-style indenting or (maybe maybe maybe -- tab-separated
tables).
Unordered lists could go like this:
* First list item
* Second list item
* Third and final list item
in that if the system sees lines that begin with space characters followed
by an asterisk, it could easily convert them to this HTML code when
displaying the page:
<UL>
<LI>First list item
<LI>Second list item
<LI>Third and final list item
</UL>
Similarly, ordered (numbered) lists could go like this:
+ First list item
+ Second list item
+ Third and final list item
and that would be automagically converted to this HTML code:
<OL>
<LI>First list item
<LI>Second list item
<LI>Third and final list item
</OL>
and would come out on the screen as:
1. First list item
2. Second list item
3. Third and final list item
--
Welp, those are some thoughts. It could be made more complex than that, if
necessary, or use a different markup paradigm, but this is how things are
currently leaning.
On Sunday I made a little prototype of a parser/converter that converts
paragraph-based text in this format to HTML on-the-fly. It was fairly
straightforward, which was encouraging, because it needs to stay very simple
for the human aspect. The parser doesn't do intelligent expansion/
substitution of <>'s yet, but that's just a SMOP, and it's independent of
the syntax.
--
Anyone know of any alternative markup possibilites worth considering? Any
success stories? Horror stories?
--Todd
[Followups to lugnet.admin.general]
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Message has 6 Replies:
 | | Re: markup syntax for member pages
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| (...) I was messing around last week with a personal page based on the LUGNET layout. Basically, it had the same information in the to (dark-blue) area, LUGNET logo in the left of the light-blue, links to my favorite LUGNET newsgroups in the middle, (...) (25 years ago, 1-Jul-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
| | | Re: markup syntax for member pages
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| Regarding the comments for a markup language: I'm no genius and I learned the most basic HTML 1.0 in about 15 seconds. I think it is very easy to understand and completely intuitive. Why would I want to learn another markup language? A proprietary (...) (25 years ago, 1-Jul-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
| | | Re: markup syntax for member pages
|
| [Just a sidenote, I ended up registering on lugnet to post this, Hi Everybody] In lugnet.admin.general, thou, Todd Lehman (lehman@javanet.com), hast wrytted... (...) Todd, I work in online publishing of scientific journals, and well you drew me out (...) (25 years ago, 2-Jul-99, to lugnet.admin.general, lugnet.general)
| | | Re: markup syntax for member pages
|
| Todd, (...) Have you checked out any of the already-existing "text to html" converters out there? I've been trying out various template/markup schemes for my own webpages (since hand-coding html simply doesn't scale beyond a few pages), and I came (...) (25 years ago, 5-Jul-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
| | | Re: markup syntax for member pages
|
| Update: Here's some sample input/output going down one currently-favored path... The details of the content in this sample aren't important (it's just a personal e-mail with some ramblings) but the makeup of it is important... I wanted to grab (...) (25 years ago, 7-Jul-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
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