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

[Todd Mitchell]

Juan Segarra
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      Thus, it is much easier to use HTML, because we are all used to it, and
     
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      moreover there are many programs to manage it. The problem I see there
     
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      is that its tags are not "content" tags, but "formatting" tags. I mean,
     
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      the <H1> for example is not a "title" tag, but a "write this very big".
     
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      On the other hand latex do has these tags, so that you write what you
     
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      want and the latex program organizes and formats your document.
     
     
Actually you have it backwards, the header tag is really a 'title' tag and
it can be defined to be really small or a blue block of orange tahoma text
with a green border.  The default format happens to be write this really
big.  You can totally seperate the content from the layout in html (xhtml)
and there is not much learning curve or special technology needed to do
this, just a style sheet component and strict use of tags.  The problem with
html layouts come from using html tags to do the layout instead of to hold
the content.  Style sheets should be used for the layout.
You can always take well-formed html and convert it to xml and then create
pdf (or whatever) format documents later on.
I agree there is more support for html.  I was planning my attack to write a
python app that would read XML format arches (having the arches as xml
containing the data, descriptions, treasure info and stripping this out into
the appropriate files during a collect type process (maybe also adding in
text description field for use in books and scrolls about monsters) and into
html docs something like the spoiler docs too.  It seems pretty doable as a
private study project (anim - mina  me the idea for this, it is practically
xml already) but I haven't had the time lately to work on it.
Aside from spoiler type documentation, I think a bigger help for project
documentation however would be a crossfire documentation wikki or something.
The documentation could be made pretty, but even more, it needs to be
updated and maintained a bit more than it is currently.