From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <20030205191626.18577.qmail@g.bio.cse.psu.edu>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Webbrowser
In-Reply-To: Message from John Stalker <stalker@Math.Princeton.EDU>
   of "Wed, 05 Feb 2003 12:54:50 EST." <200302051754.h15HspO01753@fine1008.math.princeton.edu>
From: Scott Schwartz <schwartz@bio.cse.psu.edu>
Date: Wed,  5 Feb 2003 14:16:26 -0500
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 4f56f6d0-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025

| >Frankly, if web browsers interpreted any one of troff macros, ditroff,
| >or dvi (with shell escapes removed), the world would be a better place,
|
| This comment confused me.  I already look at man pages, nicely hyperlinked,
| in my web browser (usually links) all the time.

Sure, if you write all your manpages in html or translate them to html.
My pipe-dream is to delete html (and javascript), and use venerable tools.

| Not just for all three free BSD's, but for plan9 as well.

And they look terrible compared to the troff output. :)

Also, I think it's bad to have multiple competing document formats.
The situation in *nix is that you can never tell what or where any bit
of documentation will be.  Text?  Info?  Docbook?  HTML?  What a mess.

| In general, though, having dvi
| web pages seems like a step in the wrong direction.  The original
| idea of the web was that the writer of a page leaves the business
| of how things are displayed up to the browser.

Some people say that, but my feeling is that almost everyone who builds
a web page wants to do page layout, not structural markup.  Looking at
their work, I don't think that {SG,HT,X}ML style abstraction yields the
right thing very often.  So what you have in practice is horrible html
(plus javascript!) that only displays properly on exactly the same
(huge and complex) software that was used to generate it.

If you let web page droids just publish the dvi, then the output looks
exactly right every time (modulo dpi and font issues).  More enlightened
authors can publish the troff source with standard macros.  If the web
browser can interpret both of those, you've satisfied both imperatives
without recourse to html.

By the way, in my opinion the only reason HTML survived at all is because
of NCSA Mosaic, which was the first fun way for people to look at other
people's GIFs, and the hacky notation it adopted was simple enough and
just barely good enough for the crude page layout that people wanted
to do, with absolutely no consideration for SGML sensibilities until
long after the fact.