Re: html for scholarly communication: RASH, Scholarly HTML or Dokieli?

On Sat, Sep 9, 2017 at 11:13 PM, Silvio Peroni <silvio.peroni@unibo.it>
wrote:

> Hi Johannes,
>
> About RASH, just to provide the rationale for justifying two points you
> have raised:
>
> banning h2-h6
>
>
> The rationale behind this choice is that section nesting is already
> sufficient for deriving the importance of the section title (created with
> “h1”) and there is, thus, no need to explicitly identify the importance by
> the heading by using the correct heading number. To me this approach is
> more flexible – even if someone (maybe Robin) told me in a previous thread
> that could have compatibility issues, even if it is totally fine for HTML5
> – and avoid mistakes/inconsistencies like:
>
> <section>
> <h1>…</h1>
> <p>…</p>
> <section>
> <h3>…</h3>
> <p>…</p>
> </section>
> </section>
>
> If I would use only “h1” in the previous example, the snippet would be
> perfectly consistent.
>
> In addition, using only “h1” just meaning “heading” would allow one to
> specify very low level headings (e.g. >=7) consistently – even if I really
> don’t how many “h7” headings can exist in all the scholarly articles of the
> world.
>


I did find that old discussion about it and someone mentioning that a
similar discussion had been had at an earlier stage in the HTML-process and
they decided differently, I think due to the way CSS-selectors work.


>
> adding author information to the head and not the body
>
>
> And here is the rationale of the choice: the title, authors, keywords, are
> not really the “body” of an article – which should be the text which define
> the research described in it. They are just metadata of the article, and
> the place where usually we put metadata in HTML is within “head”.
>

Right, yet in the final version that the user gets to see, they are in the
body again, because browsers only show what is in the body (except in the
title bar). I think I also understand this idea: Keeping these things out
of the "document"" is how one does it in LaTeX.


>
> I’m not saying these choice are the true path. However, I think they are
> reasonable choice though.
>

Right. Both are things I could live with as they don't limit me in
expressing things. But they are rather unorthodox. And that, in combination
with there not being some kind of standardization process with more parties
involved make me a little bit afraid that if I were to bet on RASH as it
is, we may be stuck with a format that is not able to attract much support
in many sectors because of these choices, or the format is suddenly being
changed to be closer to standard HTML5 and we have to adjust all our code
then.

It would be different if it was a standard backed by a standardization
organization and extensively discussed between different parties. As Robin
pointed out, a lot of choices will be arbitrary, and the reasoning behind
everything is not always immediately visible. So had this been a standard
coming out of such a process, most would likely follow it anyway, no matter
whether they agree with the logic, they don't or they do not care.


>
> Have a nice day :-)
>
> S.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> ----------------
> Silvio Peroni, Ph.D.
> Department of Computer Science and Engineering
> University of Bologna, Bologna (Italy)
> Tel: +39 051 2095393 <+39%20051%20209%205393>
> E-mail: silvio.peroni@unibo.it
> Web: https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/silvio.peroni/en
> Twitter: essepuntato
>
>


-- 
Johannes Wilm
http://www.johanneswilm.org
tel US: +1 (520) 399 8880
tel NO: +47 94109013
tel DE: +49 176 370 18082