FW: [WEB4LIB] Re: hanging indents?

[Gimon, Charles A]

Isn't that what XML (plus XSL or whatever) is supposed to be for?

--Charles Gimon 
  Web Coordinator
  Minneapolis Public Library

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lee Jaffe [mailto:ldjaffe at cats.ucsc.edu] 
> Sent: Friday, March 16, 2001 1:21 PM
> To: Multiple recipients of list
> Subject: [WEB4LIB] Re: hanging indents?
> 
> 
> I think that this response cuts the heart of the question, 
> that there isn't
> a set of bibliographic tags incorporated into the HTML 
> standards.  Since
> I've been creating bibliographes on the web for a long time, 
> this has been
> a constant challenge. I'd love it if the next iteration of 
> the HTML standards
> included tags for bibliography with the appropriate formating.  e.g.,
> 
> 	<bl>
> 	<ba>Swift, Jonathan</ba>
> 	<bt>Gulliver's Travels.</bt>
> 	<bl>London :</bl>
> 	<bp>Motte</bp>,
> 	<bd>1716</bd>
> `	<bc>2 v.</bc>
> 	</bl>
> 
> Until then, the choice seems to between adopting an existing 
> formatting
> tool which most closely approximates the bibliographic form or doing
> elaborate physical layouts to approximate the look of a 
> bibliography.  Since
> my reading of HTML has always been that markup is meant to describe
> content first and appearance second, I've believed that 
> adopting tags near
> in meaning was the better approach.  It doesn't take a far 
> stretch to give
> the main entry of a bibliographic citation the <dt> position and put 
> the following
> information within <dd> tags.
> 
> On the other hand, it seems to me that twisting text around 
> with elaborate
> but meaningless formatting tricks is very much outside of the 
> spirit of the
> HTML standards.
> 
> Frankly, if you want a good looking page and you don't really 
> care how you
> accomplish it, you can always do the bibliography as a .txt 
> file or lay it out
> with <pre> tags within an HTML file.  Or if you're really desparate, 
> PDF (shudder).
> 
> -- Lee Jaffe, UC Santa Cruz
>