Subject: [clisp-list] working on Implementations Notes layout

From: "Hoehle, Joerg-Cyril" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu May 22 09:21:02 2003

Hi,

>Von: Sam Steingold [mailto:[email-masked]]
>forget DSSSL.
>XSL is the way to go.

Oh boy, yet another verbose ugliness! I recently browsed the book "Web-publishing with LaTeX" or some such from Michael Goossens and Sebastian Rahtz. It had complete examples of XSL for bibtex:
Boy, what an unreadable nightmare compared to the clean, concise and powerful SXML pre-post-order transformers that I once wrote in Scheme using Oleg's tiny code. Please look up
http://pobox.com/~oleg/ftp/Scheme/SXML.html

SXML transformers could IMHO be ported to CL in an afternoon. XML parsers in CL seem to be lurking around cliki.

BTW, I used that to generate validated HTML from validatable templates, using Kawa (a Scheme environment & compiler to JVM bytecode).

Regards,
	Jorg Hohle.

---

From: Sam Steingold <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu May 22 10:50:02 2003

> * In message <[email-masked]>
> * On the subject of "[clisp-list] working on Implementations Notes layout"
> * Sent on Thu, 22 May 2003 18:19:52 +0200
> * Honorable "Hoehle, Joerg-Cyril" <[email-masked]> writes:
>
> Oh boy, yet another verbose ugliness!

yep, big time!

I want to use XSL and DocBook/XML not because I like these
abominations, but because they are standard.
The same reason applies to why I want to switch from *.d to *.c in the
CLISP sources.

We need to lower the barrier to entry, which means using the standard
tools whenever possible.

Can we concoct a beautiful concise format from which we could generate
html, pdf, ps, tex, groff &c?
Yes!

Should we?
NO!

> XML parsers in CL seem to be lurking around cliki.

I wrote one (CLOCC/CLLIB/xml.lisp)

-- 
Sam Steingold (http://www.podval.org/~sds) running RedHat9 GNU/Linux
<http://www.camera.org> <http://www.iris.org.il> <http://www.memri.org/>
<http://www.mideasttruth.com/> <http://www.palestine-central.com/links.html>
Winword 6.0 UNinstall: Not enough disk space to uninstall WinWord

---

From: Michael Koehne <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu May 22 13:39:06 2003

Moin Sam Steingold,

> > Oh boy, yet another verbose ugliness!

  I did a lot of GML,SGML and XML but my home pages are now driven by
  CGI::pWiki, because its much more natural to write the content and
  let the computer worry about how to understand the layout.

  what about using Perldoc or pWiki like documentation. So we have sparse
  coding, and readable documentation. Take a look at some of my URLs with
  a ?plain as extension to show the plain file on the disk. e.g. on [1]
  on text, lists, wiki links, tables and even ascii art.

  you might run into =location entries, when asking for ?plain, just
  follow them. CGI::pWiki is implemented as a CGI to implement an
  apache handler for *.html, so if the browser calls for *.html
  there might be a =location or purl redirection.

  clispWiki should be written in CLisp, and be a part of the source as
  it has to process the documentation into html and/or latex. It should
  be a subset of CLiki, to batch process CLiki pages. We would than just
  need to convince the admin of CLiki for CVS upload areas, and we can
  form a clisp documentation coding standard, by a rough consense of
  running code, that is part of standard clisp source tree ;)

> abominations, but because they are standard.

  they are recommendations not standards. UN/EDIFACT would be a
  document standard, but better dont think about using it for
  documentations (;

> We need to lower the barrier to entry, which means using the standard

  I often had the fealing that standards and like UN/EDIFACT or ISO 9001
  are used to raise the barrier to entry ;)

> NO!

  i can hardly agree - but i wont find time to write a clispWiki right
  now ;( sorry for wasting bandwidth with vaporware - but you are invited
  to cut'n'paste the regexp's of CGI::pWiki in any other GPLed code ;)

> I wrote one (CLOCC/CLLIB/xml.lisp)

  *aehm* whats the base URL ?

peace on your way,
  Michael
[1] : http://open360.copyleft.de/OS360/OS_360.html?plain
     (intro text, lists and wiki links)
  or http://open360.copyleft.de/OS360/IPL_into_MVT.html?plain
     (typical PerlDoc like documentation)
  or http://www.clamv.iu-bremen.de/CLAMV/TeachingLab.html?plain
     (subtitles, tables and text)
  or http://rom.copyleft.de/Maps/Southern_Part_of_Midgaard.html?plain
     (tables and ascii art)
-- 
  mailto:[email-masked]             UNA:+.? 'CED+2+:::Linux:2.4.18'UNZ+1'
  http://www.xml-edifact.org/           CETERUM CENSEO WINDOWS ESSE DELENDAM

---

From: Sam Steingold <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu May 22 13:46:03 2003

> * In message <[email-masked]>
> * On the subject of "Re: [clisp-list] working on Implementations Notes layout"
> * Sent on Thu, 22 May 2003 23:19:20 +0200
> * Honorable Michael Koehne <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>   it has to process the documentation into html and/or latex. It
>   should be a subset of CLiki, to batch process CLiki pages. We would
>   than just need to convince the admin of CLiki for CVS upload areas,
>   and we can form a clisp documentation coding standard, by a rough
>   consense of running code, that is part of standard clisp source tree
>   ;)

go ahead and write that.

>   *aehm* whats the base URL ?

<http://clocc.sf.net/>
<http://www.podval.org/~sds/data/cllib.html>

> peace on your way,

I guess I missed it.

-- 
Sam Steingold (http://www.podval.org/~sds) running RedHat9 GNU/Linux
<http://www.camera.org> <http://www.iris.org.il> <http://www.memri.org/>
<http://www.mideasttruth.com/> <http://www.palestine-central.com/links.html>
Even Windows doesn't suck, when you use Common Lisp

---

From: Nikodemus Siivola <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri May 23 05:34:08 2003

> We need to lower the barrier to entry, which means using the standard

Just a datapoint: I had some notes lying about clarifying the Impnotes
about modules and FFI, but never got around to doing it, because I never
found the energy to learn DocBook.

IMHO DocBook is not exactly a barrier-lowerer, unless you happen to know it
already.

Cheers,

 -- Nikodemus

---

From: Sam Steingold <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri May 23 07:24:04 2003

> * In message <[email-masked]>
> * Sent on Fri, 23 May 2003 15:32:47 +0300 (EEST)
> * Honorable Nikodemus Siivola <[email-masked]> writes:
>

would you rather learn an entirely new, CLISP-specific, syntax and
semantics (instead of a fairly well known XML syntax and a rather widely
used DocBook semantics)?

> IMHO DocBook is not exactly a barrier-lowerer, unless you happen to
> know it already.

many people know and use it already and more are willing to learn it
because of that.

-- 
Sam Steingold (http://www.podval.org/~sds) running RedHat9 GNU/Linux
<http://www.camera.org> <http://www.iris.org.il> <http://www.memri.org/>
<http://www.mideasttruth.com/> <http://www.palestine-central.com/links.html>
Your mouse pad is incompatible with MS Windows - your HD will be reformatted.

---

From: Nikodemus Siivola <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri May 23 08:06:11 2003

> semantics (instead of a fairly well known XML syntax and a rather widely

Nope, you're quite right there. Ideally I'd like a format I can edit with a
reasonable degree of confidence by "just guessing" and looking at the
existing text. DocBook *almost* does that, but not quite.

But as I said, that was just a datapoint. The lowest barrier of entry would
probably be provided by plaintext, I guess -- but that's not really an
option...

Cheers,

  -- Nikodemus

---

From: Sam Steingold <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri May 23 09:16:02 2003

> * In message <[email-masked]>
> * Sent on Fri, 23 May 2003 17:34:03 +0300 (EEST)
> The lowest barrier of entry would probably be provided by plaintext, I
> guess -- but that's not really an option...

It is.

if your change is _small_ __AND__ _important_, you can just send a
plain text version and I will add markup myself.

-- 
Sam Steingold (http://www.podval.org/~sds) running RedHat9 GNU/Linux
<http://www.camera.org> <http://www.iris.org.il> <http://www.memri.org/>
<http://www.mideasttruth.com/> <http://www.palestine-central.com/links.html>
If brute force does not work, you are not using enough.