When will antville support the acronym tag?
In December I raised the fact that , ,
The subsequent discussion did raise an interesting point in that Antville can only support 1 DOCTYPE at a time. What happens with old valid DOCTYPE HTML stories when a new DOCTYPE is defined in the main skin? Do they simply become invalid under a new DOCTYPE?
TIA
John
nex
When you mentioned this, I helped chase the problem down and came up with something. I thought the fix had thereafter been added to the source, but it obviously hadn't. hns, could you catch up on this, please?
You guessed it, if they contain anything that isn't defined in the new doctype, they simply become invalid, since stories may contain not only macros (which could be updated to generate valid code for a new doctype), but also hard-coded XHTML.However, this is not really a problem, you just have to choose a data format in which you save your stories; if you want to change the format, you have to convert your data. Just like switching from MS Office to OpenOffice.
JohnWalsh
Thanks for confirming my suspicion. However, if an old story is marked-up in perfectly valid HTML then it shouldn't become invalid because the DOCTYPE has been updated for the latest stories, those old stories and the macros should validate under the old Doctype. It could be a huge task to validate old stories under a more recent doctype especially, if there are depreciated tags under the more recent doctype.
I realise this involves an enormous amount of work, but I think its something that should be beared in mind.
Regards
John
nex
You forget that it's impossible to choose a DTD on a per-story basis, since as far as the web server and your browser are concerned, a story is only a part of a document – the whole documents are the pages you load. You have to choose a DTD for your whole blog, and when you change that, you might have to convert your data.
This might be a little confusing because you're thinking of single stories/articles/writeups as documents, but in this case they aren't.
One possible solution would be using no tags at all, but only macros – this would require implementing macros for acronym, legend etc. I'm not sure if this would make sense; how likely is it that you'll ever want to switch to a DTD that doesn't define these?
JohnWalsh
Hi nex,
I don't mean to keep harking on about doctype so this is my final question on the subject (promise, he says with his fingers crossed).
First of all, I know very little about web servers so when you say you can have only one doctype per blog is this an internet limitation or an antville limitation?
If it is an antville limitation, would antville not be more flexible by having a doctype per story. Its impossible to predict what tag the W3C will deprecate, I never thought they would deprecate the IMG tag for OBJECT
Regards
John
nex
As far as I believed to know until now (please someone tell me if this is wrong), you have one DTD per XML document and on the web, one page is one document (unless you use stuff like frames or iframes). Because there are different ways of browsing stories in Antville – in the future there might be even more – arbitrary combinations of different stories or parts thereof may appear on one and the same page, i.e. in the same document. Consequently, each and every story must conform to the same DTD.
It would be possible to develop a bloging application that displays every story on its own page and augments it with menus, navigation etc. that conform to the story's DTD, while only showing plain-text abstracts of stories on the front page and such places. But as this would be very silly, it's not really a limitation of Antville to restrict you to one DTD per blog, it's just the way the web works.
As I said you can either store your stories in a DTD-independent way or convert your data if the DTD changes. Mixing multiple doctypes on one page is nothing state-of-the-art-techonoly provides for.
JohnWalsh
You mentioned that if each story had its own DTD then it could have its own navigation system etc. I like the sound of that. Just imagine your stories (X)HTML would never become invalidated and each story could list the most recent "related" (share same category(s)) stories.
I know I am getting carried away here as its starting to sound more like a CMS system than a blogging system but I don't think its that foolish.
Thanks again
John
nex
Actually, what I wanted to say was this: You won't want to display just the story on its own, you'd at least want to have some navigation that takes you back to the weblog, calendar, topic page or whereever you came from, lets you edit the story etc. However, putting all of this inside the same web page would be ridiculously complicated, so you'd never implement it that way. You'd rather have different frames with different DTDs, which also potentially causes problems.
A 'per story' navigation doesn't make sense; navigation must be consistent over the whole site. Navigation features that take into account the content of the current story (e.g. by listing links to similar ones) is useful, but something different.
I'm still not convinced that having different DTDs within one site would make sense. Updating a story with deprecated tags is just a matter of a quick search-and-replace, whereas managing ancient document formats is a difficult task, and I don't see any advantage of the latter method. Anyway, we shouldn't waste too much thought on that topic, as it will soon become a little different with the introduction of modular document type definitions.