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HTML Tags For Academic Printing?

Posted by timothy on from the gedankenexperiment-draws-cries-of-use-ps-or-pdf dept.

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?

1 of 338 comments (clear)

  1. Re:LaTeX by Petrushka · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I have a sneaking suspicion that when the OP is saying things like "no CSS" and doesn't mention LaTeX, s/he is actually giving specifications in a very obfuscated way -- specifications that need to be deduced. What I take from the post is that the OP wants

    • Portability. Anyone can open an HTML file without having to install new software; the same doesn't go for ODF, LaTeX, or MSWord. I suspect this is the main thing the OP wants. But this shouldn't rule out CSS.
    • Everything in one file: I'm guessing this may be why the OP doesn't want CSS. But that's not a good reason to avoid CSS either, since CSS can perfectly easily go in the same file. (I think it does rule out editing the XML in ODF documents, though, since as far as I'm aware they're always a composite of several files.)
    • Read/edit in the same document. This could be another reason why the OP doesn't mention LaTeX. LaTeX is perfect for editing, not so great for reading: for that you have PDF. Maybe the OP doesn't want to have two separate files like that.

    I'm guessing the OP has been inspired by the use of HTML for slide presentations, in the form of S5. I can see that. But the specifications, if I've deduced them correctly, are not hugely well-thought-out ones. I can kind of see someone not wanting to use LaTeX for the reasons given above, but insisting on no CSS is crazy.

    In any case, the OP should certainly give slightly clearer specifications if s/he doesn't want to have people yelling "LaTeX!!!" all day.