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HTML Tags For Academic Printing?
meketrefi writes "It's been quite a while since I got interested in the idea of using html (instead of .doc. or .odf) as a standard for saving documents — including the more official ones like academic papers. The problem is using HTML to create pages with a stable size that would deal with bibliographical references, page breaks, different printers, etc. Does anyone think it is possible to develop a decent tag like 'div,' but called 'page,' specially for this? Something that would make no use of CSS? Maybe something with attributes as follows: {page size="A4" borders="2.5cm,2.5cm,2cm,2cm" page_numbering="bottomleft,startfrom0"} — You get the idea... { /page} I guess you would not be able to tell when the page would be full, so the browser would have to be in charge of breaking the content into multiple pages when needed. Bibliographical references would probably need a special tag as well, positioned inside the tag ..." Is this such a crazy idea? What would you advise?
And the rest of us used Emacs, just to get the indenting consistent and make sure we closed our parentheses correctly. But the amount of time people waste on page breaking where they want, font selection, "just so" footnote standards, etc. is a sign of people who don't have anything to actually say.
The exception is people who make visual illusion picture books. Other than that, let's get over our "web designer", IDE driven fascination with layout, and use a straightforward plain text format. Then get on with writing something worth reading, not something to be treasured for its footnote layout.