Digital zines II: HTML and friends

From XPUB & Lens-Based wiki

Construction.gif page still in development

Maybe better title: HTML and epub (or vice versa)

  • the "web trinities": URL, HTTP, HTML / HTML, CSS, JS
  • XHTML/RDF... and the so-called semantic web... (and relations to the (historical) XML community)
  • Metadata (in SVG)
  • EPUB
  • pandoc
  • Regular expressions, grep, sed?

some "old school" tricks worth understanding...

Example from raspberry pi script:

sed -i 's| init=/usr/lib/raspi-config/init_resize\.sh||' /boot/cmdline.txt
whiptail --yesno "COntinue" 20 20

Timeline

1989

HTML Berners-Lee, CERN

1996

CSS1

1997

CSS2

1998

XML CSS3 stars...

2000

XHTML

---

Markdown was developed by John Gruber who writes on his website:

The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

As an example, he offers the source text of his own website.

Markup

Ed Mosher, Ray Lorie, and I invented the first structured markup language in 1969, IBM’s “Generalized Markup Language” (GML). In 1970 I coined the phrase “markup language” in order to describe our invention.

GML led to SGML, which I invented in 1974. SGML literally makes the infrastructure of modern society possible. Our incredibly complex systems and products require massive amounts of documentation – 4 million pages for a single model of aircraft, for example, which must be updated quarterly. That documentation couldn’t be created and managed without SGML.

The same is true for the documentation of nuclear plants, oil rigs, government laws and regulations, military systems – and anything else that is too complex for a single person to understand and that has life-and-death significance. All of those things are documented with SGML.

The World Wide Web is also powered by SGML. In 1999 the Society for Technical Communication recognized that synergy by conferring Honorary Fellowships on both Tim Berners-Lee and myself. It was the only dual award since 1974, when Buckminster Fuller and Frank Winship received the first two Honorary Fellowships.

HTML is an SGML application, while XML is a Web-optimized subset of SGML. For a quick and clear explanation of XML, read XML in an Instant: A Non-geeky Introduction.

Source: http://charlesfgoldfarb.com/

Copy editing – “mark up”

File:Proofreader-markup-1950s.jpg image source

File:Copyedit.jpg

Sheet music

File:Oregon My Oregon.jpg

Mark me up, mark me down

A timeline

1989
Berners-Lee proposal
1993
HTML(1), CERN
1994
Håkon Lie’s CSS proposal and the saga
1993
img tag
1994
blairmag
1996
animated gif support added to Netscape 2.0 src
1997
papermag compare with today
1998
XML1.0 published + XSL + XSLT
2000
XHTML … “a reformulation of HTML 4 as an XML 1.0 application”
2007
EPUB2 – first publication of “epub” specification for electonic books, based on HTML/web technologies
2011
CSS 2.1 adds rules for “paged media”
2014
HTML5 and the “living standard”, see also whatwg and w3c conflict
2018
CSS Paged Media Module Level 3

ftp

html

https://www.december.com/html/spec/

pandoc

pandoc: a universal document converter

pandoc’s markdown and extensions

Creating an ebook with pandoc

making slides with markdown + pandoc

Platforms