Caveat Lector

If you were following CavLec on its own URL this weekend rather than through RSS or Atom, I do apologize most sincerely to you; I have been making a heck of a mess.

As far as Firefox is concerned, I’m mostly done. Few tweaks left (DATES, where are my dates?), but the layout and typography are mostly there.

The funny thing is, it feels different to me now, old CavLec does. Less Webby, less freewheeling, less brusque, nicer and more formal. We’ll see if the writing turns out to echo the design.

I haven’t a clue what this looks like in IE. I’ll take a gander sometime and fix anything glaring, but honestly? I don’t care that much. Microsoft is three-day-old fish.

Just about a decade ago now, I read my very first markup book. Fortunately, it was a good markup book, lucid and understandable. At that point in my orbit, I could have been scared off. I wasn’t. In large part thanks to that book, I became a tolerable designer of DTDs.

That book is now online, and by gosh, it’s still lucid and understandable. Even if you don’t write DTDs any more (and how many of us do?), it’s a fine, fine resource for how to think about text modeling.

I’m happy to see it again.

So after my initial howl of horror at seeing what my nice new Manakin design looked like in Internet Explorer, I put the project away for a while. Okay, okay, I procrastinated, because I hate fixing browser bugs worse than you can possibly imagine.

Today I got back to it, and I discovered that I had inadvertently copied over all of the Manakin default design’s IE fixes into my new theme. Oh, well, don’t need those, I said, and got rid of them.

And all the display problems on the front page but one magically resolved themselves in IE7.

I feel ever so much better now. Still not looking forward to IE6, but at least I don’t feel quite so much a duffer.

The title of this post refers to the horrible noise emitted by a web designer on her first glimpse of the havoc wreaked by Internet Explorer on a design that works beautifully in real browsers.

(Though honestly, it could have been worse. I’m scared of what I’ll see in IE6, and as for IE5…)

I owe Dr. Peter Sefton an apology for not addressing him as Dr. Sefton here. Mea culpa, and I’m sorry; the error was inadvertent and no disrespect was intended.

I should also make clear that I’m rooting for ICE-RS and Lemon8, and that my still-significant reservations about their prospects have nothing whatever to do with the people building them or the quality of their work (which I have no grounds to evaluate—save past experience with similar tools—as I haven’t tested either package yet).

No, this is a problem that lives at the intersection between people and computers. I don’t believe that authors will always not use styles; I know better. But that, to me, is not the question. The question is “will enough authors use these tools (whether based on styles or not), and will they use them adequately enough, to base an efficient publishing workflow on their work?”

I ain’t seen it happen yet, is all I’m sayin’. My jaundiced soul believes right to the bottom of its toes that markup is an editor’s tool, not an author’s, not to mention that a lot of players have different text-structure needs.

But that doesn’t mean that ICE-RS and Lemon8 are useless. It’s not as though editorial tools are perfect! (Back in the day I made a suggestion or two about how to get these tools right for authoring. I don’t think anybody listened to me then, and I doubt anyone will now. The point is, there are advances to be made, if anyone is willing to think hard enough about them and able to implement them.)

I find myself in an odd rhetorical position here. Under most circumstances, head-shakers with their eternal “Tried that. Didn’t work. Won’t work this time either,” bug the living you-know-what out of me. And here I am being one, and I don’t like it. Sometimes things happen when it’s their time to happen. Maybe now is the time for word-processing–based authoring tools for markup. Who am I to say it’s not?

Except…

The head-shakers are often wrong because something’s changed in their environment that makes the New Thing feasible where it wasn’t before. Roy Tennant made this point the other day in a different context. I guess where I go off the rails on author markup tools is that I don’t see what’s changed in author brains or in the value proposition for these tools such that authors are going to climb onboard en masse.

Maybe I’m wrong. I’d love to be.

Peter Sefton got a mite huffy at me for my contention that Word-template-based scholarly-article production systems invariably fail when they meet the author.

I don’t make this stuff up just to be annoying. Honestly and truly, I don’t.

Seems everything old is new again at Extreme Markup 2007 too:

I went to see David Lee of Epocrates on getting content authored in MS Word into appropriate XML. The core of this talk was an extended lament on how authors insist on using Word; even if you provide specialized authoring tools, they compose in Word and then cut and paste, more or less incorrectly, into the specialized tool. Epocrates has tried a variety of strategies: Word styles (authors won’t use them), tagged sections (authors screw them up), form fields (plaintext only, so authors delete them and type in rich text instead). In the end, they adopted Word tables as the safest and least corruptible approach. A few Word macros provide useful validations, and when the document is complete, a Word 2003 macro rewrites it using Word 2003 XML (unless it is already in that format). I pointed out that the approach of having authors use Word and saving in plain text was also viable, leaving all markup to be added by automated downstream procssing; David said that design was too simple for the complex documents his authors were creating.

My contentions in a nutshell. Thank you, Mr. Lee and Mr. Cowan.

I will add that testing such tools on a small, highly-selected author population (as Mr. Sefton’s blog post indicates that he has done) leads to tools that work very well for a small, highly-selected population of authors—and fail utterly once they move beyond that population.

I do not. DO. NOT. Make this stuff up. Been there, done that, don’t even have the T-shirt any more.

First there was ICE-RS, now there is Lemon8-XML.

I’ve asked to test both of them, and I’ll let y’all know what happens. I’m glad there’s more than one development effort going on; if the developers are as sensible as they seem to be, we’ll see some cross-fertilization, which can only be to the good.

Back in the day, CavLec was a nerve center for spine-tingling rants about markup and publishing workflows. (I think my favorite one is still this, perhaps because it’s less ranty, though for those who like rants this one’s good too.) Then I quit ranting about markup and publishing workflows in favor of all kinds of other fun things to rant about.

The circle does close, though. I left a shamefully snippy comment to this post about PDFs in repositories because snippy was the nicest I could manage, my eyes were rolling so hard. (I have pretty serious PDF-hater cred, but even I know PDF is way easier to deal with in workflows than HTML.) Then another blog post picked up my snippy comment, whereupon it winged its way to Peter Murray-Rust’s blog.

Ah, markup and publishing workflows. You are really only marginally better than no markup. Why? No tools. CavLec’s been ranting about “no tools” since 2002, folks, and there are still no tools.

There’s almost a tool, though, it appears. Peter Sefton is working on a project called ICE-RS, one of whose goals is to make such a tool.

I never, ever, ever rhapsodize over something like this before I get my hands on it. Ever. I’ve seen too many tools promise the moon and deliver a misshapen meteorite. But from what I can tell, it looks generally to be the right idea—word-processing templates that, if used properly, do the right thing. (The big caveat is “if used properly.” Authors do horrible things with word-processors. You really can’t imagine until you’ve seen it. Unless it sharply restricts the host program’s functionality, no template on this earth will get decent results from all or even most authors.) Plus, such templates tend to be designed by someone with all the design sense of an eight-year-old.

So we’ll see. But if it works as advertised, I’d use it—because I know how to use these things. Learned nearly a decade ago, working in a little typesetting house. Everything old, it is new again.

As for repositories and HTML—I always do website imports into the repository myself. Not only does that mean nobody (not even me) has to deal with DSpace’s nasty clicky-clicky file-at-a-time upload UI, it means I get a chance to fix links and grotty markup, something else I learned to do a decade ago.

For those of us who (like me) are absolutely terrible at picking out color palettes for websites: an image-based palette generator. Give it an image, get back two palettes (built with web-safe colors, too; nice touch) that will work with that image.

I tried it with the Morris background to CavLec, and what I got back was so gorgeous as to make me ashamed of what’s here.

Strikes me as something that would work with presentation palettes, too. If I weren’t nearly done with the San Antonio presentation, I’d feed it a few bus photos and see what I got back.

Via Blogula Rasa.

So I’m working on the layout for Open Access Research in Microsoft Word, fully cognizant that I promised I’d deliver HTML as well as PDF.

I know better than to try getting at HTML through Microsoft Word. Been there, done that, would rather chew my left leg off at the hip than try it again. Next stop? OpenOffice.org.

Download, double-click, install, hm, this isn’t as bad as I remember it being back around version 1.2. Open up the test doc. Wow. Looks pretty good! Lost a line underneath the logo, but that’s no big deal. Everything else translated perfectly.

File menu, Export would seem the logical choice. Choose XHTML from the drop-down. Type a filename (odd UI problem there; I shouldn’t actually have to do this). Save. Take a deep breath. Open the result in my text editor.

Whoa.

I boggled for a good ten minutes, scrolling back and forth. Because, the markup produced? Conspicuously fails to suck. Conspicuously.

Perfect it ain’t. There’s all sorts of CSS in there that I don’t want or need (and boy, are those CSS bulleted lists ever fugly), and it didn’t pick up on my ArticleTitle style for some reason, and it didn’t manage to figure out that the Heading The First style was actually an <h1> despite a hint to that effect in the style definition, and it didn’t get rid of the footer (but then, I didn’t have any way to tell it to).

But it’s about as far from the you-know-what soup that Microsloth Turd spews out as it is possible to imagine. I can clean it up just the way I want in a few easily-scriptable regexes or SAX calls. It’s easy. Did I mention easy?

My hat’s off to the OpenOffice people. They most truly and sincerely rock.