HTML documents, was Re: [CF List] spell summary

[Juan Segarra]

I think that using HTML for documentation may be the best option now, 
but I also think that that's not the "correct" way. I mean, I suppose 
you all agree that the best correct solution would be something like 
SGML because it was specifically designed for documentation. However we 
are all very lazy and that seems to much to learn :-)
Thus, it is much easier to use HTML, because we are all used to it, and 
moreover there are many programs to manage it. The problem I see there 
is that its tags are not "content" tags, but "formatting" tags. I mean, 
the <H1> for example is not a "title" tag, but a "write this very big". 
On the other hand latex do has these tags, so that you write what you 
want and the latex program organizes and formats your document. In this 
way, with one source you could use the pdflatex or the latex2html or the 
latex2anything. One of the problems here is that this is not so popular 
as HTML, and there are very limited latex "compilers", and not all of 
them work as they should do. However, if there would be a very good 
latex2html, do you choose using directly HTML or latex?

Also, a second problem with this is that sources are sometimes related 
to the final output. For example, I substituted the words "wand", 
"scroll" and "book" by "w", "s" and "b", just because it didn't fit in 
the pdf. This problem is similar with what Joris said about using HTML 
with as less layout as possible, that is, making documents as much 
portable as possible.

Anyway, as I said above, HTML probably is the best option now, but maybe 
not in a long term.

-- 
Juan Segarra