Re: [PATCH] export to various flavors of (X)HTML

[Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com>]

Hi Eric,

thanks for the reply.  OK, I am going with the patch for now, let's
push more thinking about HTML5 further down the line.

Thanks for working this out!

- Carsten

On 6.5.2013, at 09:36, Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> wrote:

> Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> Hi Eric, Rick, Francois and others,
>> 
>> Nicolas commented to me about this patch that he was wondering if it
>> would not be better to have a separate backend for html5, i.e.
>> ox-html5.el that could be derived from ox-html.el and make it easier
>> in the future to build it out to take full advantage of html5 features.
>> I think he has a point, and I would like to hear your comments.
> 
> My initial reaction is: yes, eventually, but perhaps not now. A few
> reasons:
> 
> 1. This patch is already done, and it works, modulo bugfixes (not a
> great reason, I know).
> 
> 2. The patch ended up with two predicate functions (org-html-xhtml-p and
> org-html-html5-p) because we really are dealing with four distinct
> states: X or not, and 5 or not. Splitting off ox-html5 only isolates one
> of those predicates: the "X or not" question would still have to be
> asked and answered in both ox-html and ox-html5. You could just as well
> split it the other way (ox-xhtml and ox-html), and have the X variants
> actually build a DOM tree and write xml (I'm not actually advocating
> that, but I just read this[1]).
> 
> 3. The change to org-html-special-block takes care of the large majority
> of new html5 features. The change to inline-images is fairly small.
> Otherwise, there are many new inline elements that could be used, but in
> many cases browser support for these is limited or nonexistent, and even
> basic syntax is up in the air. They can wait (or be handled with custom
> link types).
> 
> More importantly, the html5 version of, for example, the formatting of
> timestamps would look very like the (x)html(4) version, except that the
> final tag would be a bit different (<time> instead of <span>, with
> different attributes). Most of the surrounding logic would be the same.
> So ox-html5 would only override a few of ox-html's formatting functions,
> and even those few would largely be copy-n-paste from ox-html. I'm not
> sure that's worth it. (Unless derived backends could call back to their
> parent backends' implementations, a la OO inheritance? But that way lies
> madness.)
> 
> To be clear, I think *something* more drastic should be done. But my
> feeling is: go with this patch for now. Then stop there. The next time
> someone feels the need to expand org's html5 capabilities, think about
> new backends.
> 
> I'm happy to continue with the discussion, and the coding. I think part
> of the problem is HTML itself: as Rick's polyglot concerns show, the
> formats can be multiple things at once. Another part of the problem is
> that org has a certain take on HTML that I guess comes out of the early
> days of Unix documentation, when it really was the HyperText Markup
> Language: linked sets of static pages, with up/prev/next links, and
> headers and footers on each page. `org-html-divs' is a good example of
> this, and a perfect example of where html5 would handle things
> differently. I would argue that that should no longer be the default
> point of view on HTML. If we're going to rethink things, let's rethink
> this too.
> 
> Eric
> 
> [1] http://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2008/06/data-in-garbage-out.html
> 
> 
>> On 2.5.2013, at 23:07, Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> wrote:
>> 
>>> Rick Frankel <rick@rickster.com> writes:
>>> 
>>>> On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 08:26:52PM -0700, Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
>>>>> Rick Frankel <rick@rickster.com> writes:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> Whoops. Wrong key. Patch actually attached to this email...
>>>>>> rick
>>>>> 
>>>>> Great, I'll consolidate all these -- would it be better to mush them
>>>>> into one big patch, or to keep them separate (I suppose for ease of
>>>>> rollback, if something goes wrong)?
>>>> 
>>>> Probably squashing them into one patch would be the best. But Carsten
>>>> or Bastien might disagree :).
>>>> 
>>>> rick
>>> 
>>> Okay, there it is: one big patch (including your xml declaration fix).
>>> 
>>> I didn't add any more refined handling of the html5-fancy option. As a
>>> second-order option it didn't seem worthy of an #+OPTIONS entry, and I
>>> didn't bother checking for an empty string, either. It can always be
>>> #+BINDed if necessary, and if it ever annoys anyone I can fix it
>>> further.
>>> 
>>> E
>>> 
>>> <0001-ox-html.el-Export-to-different-X-HTML-flavors-includ.patch>
> 
>