On Mon, 17 Mar 1997, Mr C A Rusbridge wrote:
> > In an effort to make Acrobat (.pdf) files available in HTML format, thereby
> > increasing Internet access for people with visual disabilities, Adobe has
> > created this simple but powerful site. Users simply type in the full URL of
> > a .pdf document, and the site returns the document in HTML format.
...
Or alternatively the HTML document can be converted from the original
format, thus eliminating the time-consuming step of creating an
intermediate Acrobat file.
>From reading a number of articles in Ariadne and postings to this list
it seems that Acrobat is growing in popularity, as it is available today
and there are a variety of tools available. However I think it's clear
that the SGML / richer HTML / stylesheet alternative is rapidly developing
and will have major benefits, not the least being its openness (Acrobat
is owned by Adobe. Would we be advocating a proprietary solution for
eLib projects if it was owned by Microsoft? What will we do if
Microsoft ever bought Adobe? Or if Adobe introduced charging for
software to read Acrobat file - remember what happened to GIF).
On the SGML / HTML side there is a lot of work going on. There is a W3C
draft document on XML (Extended Markup Language) which is a lightweight
form of SGML designed for the Internet (see
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-xml-961114.html).
There is also Cascading Stylesheets (CSS), which is now a W3C
recommendation (see http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/REC-CSS1-961217.html)
CSS is supported by MS Internet Explorer v3 and will be supported by
Netscape v 4. Work is also in progress on Aural Cascading Style Sheets
(ACSS) (see http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/NOTE-ACSS) and CSS
using Javascript (no URL to hand).
At the forthcoming WWW6 conference there are tutorial sessions on
"Enriching Document Structure: HTML, CSS and XML" and "WebSite Mapping".
The latter session will cover developments such as Web Collections (which
will enable you to, among other things, to use HTML LINK tags to define
relationships between groups of documents for a variety of purposes such
as providing 2D and 3D site visualisation tools) - see the tutorial
programme at
http://www-ee.technion.ac.il/W3C/WWW6_sitemapping_workshop.html
and the Web Collection draft at
http://www-ee.technion.ac.il/W3C/WebCollection.html
Commercial software products are being released which are beginning to
exploit document structure. For example SoftQuad's HiP (Hotmetal
Intranet Publishing) suite enables you to search the contents of
structural elements (find "eLib" in H1 tags), defined your own structure
for searching purposes (using the DIV tag to define a structure in your
document), use stylesheets to provide personalised views on documents
(e.g. use DIV CLASS=novice and DIV CLASS=expert tags and stylesheets to
display the usedefined DIVs) and to create user-defined active tables of
contents (using Javascript to give a standard table of contents, then to
expand it from H1s to includes H2s and H3s, have a table of contents on
other tags - e.g. all IMG tags to have a table of contents of images -
or use DIV CLASS= to define your own table of contents.)
I'm convinced that eLib projects are in a good position to make early
exploitation of these new facilities (which in fairness the SGML
community have been pushing for some time).
You can find ut more about the WWW 6 conference by using the web
conferencing tool at http://ice.www6conf.org/ or reading the proceedings
at http://proceedings.www6conf.org/
Comments?
Brian Kelly
------------------------------------------------------
Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus
UKOLN, University of Bath, BATH, England, BA2 7AY
Email: [log in to unmask] URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
Phone: 01225 323943 FAX: 01225 826838
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