in reply to [Home Work]: Using (subset of) HTML as publishing language at PerlMonks: bug or feature?

On one hand, the expressiveness of HTML is nice. On the other hand, there are many ways to do the same thing and I'd prefer never having to filter out JavaScript or CSS tricks or to edit in <code> tags.

For my next site built on Everything, I plan to use a Wiki format. That should provide the most-used formatting in a controlled environment.

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Re^2: [Home Work]: Using (subset of) HTML as publishing language at PerlMonks: bug or feature?
by monsieur_champs (Curate) on Jun 21, 2004 at 12:33 UTC

    Greetings, chromatic.

    I guess you see more disvantages than advantages on using HTML as the publishing language. What is the difference from HTML to a WikiWiki like format? You will need to learn the tags anyway. Is the learning curve smoother than the HTML learning curve? Even seeing HTML as a wide-spread tool?

    -- monsieur_champs

[reply]

      The difference is that you don't filter--you convert. If you use an HTML-subset, you have to check for a multitude of different things, many of which may have only been mentioned in one sentance of one paragraph inside a whole heap of documentation. Missing one means that something you didn't want got through.

      If you use a specifically-defined format (UBB tags come to mind), you get to specify exactly what goes in there and anything else is simply invalid. In this case, you can escape any HTML in the data (which is a lot easier than filtering specific kinds of HTML).

      ----
      send money to your kernel via the boot loader.. This and more wisdom available from Markov Hardburn.

[reply]

        Thank you, fellow hardburn. This is a nice point of view. But, as stated at the begining of the thread, I'm interested on the user's point of view, not in the application PoV.

        So the question stands. What you think is easy to learn and use, under the user's perspective?

        May the gods bless() you for sharing your wisdom with us.

        -- monsieur_champs

[reply]

      The system I have in mind has volunteers of all sorts of computer literacy levels entering data. I'd rather teach them a few bits of Wiki format to do exceptional things than to teach them HTML to do normal things.

      Consider writing plain paragraphs separated by blank lines. (That's very easy to explain; it takes one sentence and people can remember it.)

      In the system that expects input in HTML, all paragraphs will run together. You could add logic to turn two newlines into paragraph tags, but that's a heuristic so it'll fail in odd ways sometimes, especially if the user has already added HTML.

      In the system that expects Wiki formatting, those paragraphs turn into actual paragraphs, as if the user had used the formatting deliberately.

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