Re: Introducing RASH 0.4

Hi Ruben,

>> - old elements such "div" and "span" have been replaced by more appropriate and semantic-oriented elements, e.g., "section", "figure", "figcaption", "blockquote", "pre" and "code";
> 
> I'm happy with this decision.
> It strikes me that the RASH document now
> actually reads like an "how to do HTML properly" guide
> (as opposed to "how to do HTML differently”).

Thanks for this!

> So, given that RASH now uses proper HTML elements for these things,
> how far away are we now from "RASH = simply write proper HTML"?
> (…with of course the added conventions like bibliographies.)

To me, RASH is one of the possible approaches to write proper HTML, and has the advantage of being theoretically grounded on a strong theory of design patterns for markup documents (see [1] for more information about it). In particular, RASH focuses mainly on scientific articles on purpose, and tries to keep the resulting document as simple as possible by proposing a limited set of HTML elements to use, each characterised by a precise semantics. Maybe this approach can be applied successfully also to more complex documents, such as books – that typically include additional structures (e.g., preface, index, etc.) that have not been handled by RASH yet.

While simplicity is a charming goal to chase, I’m not sure this would be possible for any possible kind of HTML document. There are documents that are intrinsically complex, such as those presenting overlapping markup for particular reasons (e.g., for embedding variants copies of the same document in the same HTML file), or those ones created mainly for serving web applications instead of readable and paper-based content. I’m not sure we can provide a clear and undebatable approach for dealing with this heterogeneity.

However, if you restrict the domain to “simply write basic documents by using proper HTML” (where the word “basic” is here used to exclude all the aforementioned complexities in HTML documents), then I think this is one of the aims RASH has to chase.

Have a nice day :-)

S.


# References

[1] Di Iorio, A., Peroni, S., Poggi, F., Vitali, F. (2014). Dealing with structural patterns of XML documents. In Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 65 (9): 1884-1900. Hoboken, New Jersey, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/asi.23088
http://speroni.web.cs.unibo.it/publications/di-iorio-2014-dealing-with-structural.pdf <http://speroni.web.cs.unibo.it/publications/di-iorio-2014-dealing-with-structural.pdf> 


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