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                       Hypertext, weblogs and journals

I'm going to have to work on more details of this if I'm going to to this.
The internal anchor names will have to change. Since I'm currently using SSI
(Server Side Includes) for this, I just realized it's not going to work.
Also, while I have an idea for how I want to store the data, the main problem
is one of creating the daily update page.

I like the format for weblogs where a few days worth of entries exist on the
main page, but the storing of each day's entry is leading me more towards a
journal like layout. If I didn't want to have several days worth of entries
on the main page, then there wouldn't be a problem.

Also, doing this weblog/journal experiment is making me wish there was a
better way of doing styles than there is currently. It would be nice if all
browsers (including Lynx) supported CSS, (Cascading Style Sheets) or XML
(eXtensible Markup Language) and XCSS (eXtensible Cascading Style Sheets) or
whatever it's called. I suppose that's what PHP [1] is for. And in that
limited case, PHP might be a good compromise. But I still don't like PHP all
that much. Can't say why, other than a case of Not Invented Here Syndrome.

Besides, I feel that the work I did on the Electric King James [2] is
relavent here—namely a better way of referencing content.

A few years ago I identified why I dislike WEB, [3] and it came down to it
failed my “1 am scenario.” Namely, that I'm a maintenance programmer, it's 1
am and I have this bug I have to fix yesturday and I'm staring at this huge
mess of a file. It came down to a mixing of What (an interface or data
description), why (the documentation) and how (the actual code). Very ugly. I
solved that problem (at least for me) by separating all three out (what are
the header files, how are the source files, and why is the documentation
written).

But a week or two ago, I realized that what I've been trying to achieve with
web-based programs can be solved by a similar separation—only in this case,
it's not what, how or why, but data, definition and display (or substance,
structure and style). HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is an ad-hoc mixture
of definition and display with data. I can't comment on SGML, not knowing it
well enough, but XML seems to be a strict data and definition mixture with
display being left out (or left to the style sheets). That's okay, but it
still makes transclusion [4] difficult. That's not saying it can't be done;
it has, [5] to some degree. But if the data and definition were separated, it
might make transclusion easier.

Although some might say too easy.

Anyway, the reason I'm going on about the separation of data, definition and
display is to help me at least, organize what is amounting to, a large amount
of random data. And in a way, my mod_litbook [6] is related. Certainly, the
data, definition and display are separated, but it still isn't a generalized
solution yet. But I'm getting there. I think I'm on the right track here.

I'm also going to have to deal with META tags and whatnot.

[1] http://www.php.org/
[2] http://literature.conman.org/bible/
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:1999/12/10.6
[4] http://space.njit.edu:5080/papers/sidebars/nelson.html
[5] http://reality.sgi.com/grafica/merge/
[6] https://github.com/spc476/mod_litbook

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