I took a look at the source for the recent handsome re-release of PG's edition of A Christmas Carol (46-h). The code is bit old, <p> tags are not terminated and the formating could be formated a bit better to make it more readable. For example, the first paragraph looked like this: <p> <span class="caps">Marley</span> was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. I ran the file through HTML-Tidy which turned it into this: <p><span class="caps">Marley</span> was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.</p> It took about ten seconds to open the, file run the file through tidy and save it. This resulted in a file which is consistent, standards compliant and far easier to read and process. Open tags in HTML are an artifact of SGML which can confuse some browsers, processing software and limit what you can do with CSS. I suggest that all PG html files be run through Tidy before being released. If anyone wants the tidy'd version let me know. b/ -- Brad Collins <brad@chenla.org>, Bangkok, Thailand
On Mon, Nov 01, 2004 at 12:43:41PM +0700, Brad Collins wrote:
I took a look at the source for the recent handsome re-release of PG's edition of A Christmas Carol (46-h).
The code is bit old, <p> tags are not terminated and the formating could be formated a bit better to make it more readable.
... Strangely, this title doesn't have the usual filename mask in GUTINDEX.ALL. I'm cc'ing George to see about adding this. The answer, as you saw, is that the file is old and therefore predates our current procedures. Lacking a /p doesn't prevent a file from passing the validator at w3c, except for the most recent HTML versions, so this file could probably still pass today. Anyway: cleaning up HTML is definitely welcome. When we update a file, these days, we also move it into the new directory structure (the post-10K naming scheme), so this would be /4/46/46h.htm rather than /etext91/xmas10h.htm or whatever. We also add a new header, and apply it to all other files for this eBook. In short, it's more involved than just fixing the file. David Widger has updated hundreds of titles, and we would welcome anyone else with desires to work on this task. Personally, I would not mind waiting until we also have good XML procedures in place, so that we could kill two birds with one stone (actually, more than one stone, since it's more work). Finally, let me mention that we usually also run gutcheck and find/fix many other errors in a typical older title. I hope this helps explain. I didn't mention any limitations of Tidy, but of course like any tool you need to make sure it doesn't accidentally do greater harm than it solves. Really finally: send updated files (or URLs) to errata AT pglaf.org , even if you didn't do all of the above. Thanks! -- Greg
For example, the first paragraph looked like this:
<p> <span class="caps">Marley</span> was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
I ran the file through HTML-Tidy which turned it into this:
<p><span class="caps">Marley</span> was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.</p>
It took about ten seconds to open the, file run the file through tidy and save it. This resulted in a file which is consistent, standards compliant and far easier to read and process.
Open tags in HTML are an artifact of SGML which can confuse some browsers, processing software and limit what you can do with CSS.
I suggest that all PG html files be run through Tidy before being released.
If anyone wants the tidy'd version let me know.
b/
-- Brad Collins <brad@chenla.org>, Bangkok, Thailand
_______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d
Just to clear up any confusion.... Our text of A Christmas Carol has already been moved into the new directory structure. It's "base directory" can be found at: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/4/46/ When a file is reposted, the Gutindex line is modified, so as to no longer include the filename mask (which no longer serves a purpose in finding the files). Also, a note that not all files that are fixed up are automatically put into the new directory structure. For instance, our text of "The Count of Monte Cristo" was updated in the past day, and is still in its old location: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1184 Andrew On Sun, 31 Oct 2004, Greg Newby wrote:
On Mon, Nov 01, 2004 at 12:43:41PM +0700, Brad Collins wrote:
I took a look at the source for the recent handsome re-release of PG's edition of A Christmas Carol (46-h).
The code is bit old, <p> tags are not terminated and the formating could be formated a bit better to make it more readable.
...
Strangely, this title doesn't have the usual filename mask in GUTINDEX.ALL. I'm cc'ing George to see about adding this.
The answer, as you saw, is that the file is old and therefore predates our current procedures. Lacking a /p doesn't prevent a file from passing the validator at w3c, except for the most recent HTML versions, so this file could probably still pass today.
Anyway: cleaning up HTML is definitely welcome. When we update a file, these days, we also move it into the new directory structure (the post-10K naming scheme), so this would be /4/46/46h.htm rather than /etext91/xmas10h.htm or whatever.
We also add a new header, and apply it to all other files for this eBook. In short, it's more involved than just fixing the file.
David Widger has updated hundreds of titles, and we would welcome anyone else with desires to work on this task. Personally, I would not mind waiting until we also have good XML procedures in place, so that we could kill two birds with one stone (actually, more than one stone, since it's more work).
Finally, let me mention that we usually also run gutcheck and find/fix many other errors in a typical older title.
I hope this helps explain. I didn't mention any limitations of Tidy, but of course like any tool you need to make sure it doesn't accidentally do greater harm than it solves.
Really finally: send updated files (or URLs) to errata AT pglaf.org , even if you didn't do all of the above. Thanks! -- Greg
For example, the first paragraph looked like this:
<p> <span class="caps">Marley</span> was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
I ran the file through HTML-Tidy which turned it into this:
<p><span class="caps">Marley</span> was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.</p>
It took about ten seconds to open the, file run the file through tidy and save it. This resulted in a file which is consistent, standards compliant and far easier to read and process.
Open tags in HTML are an artifact of SGML which can confuse some browsers, processing software and limit what you can do with CSS.
I suggest that all PG html files be run through Tidy before being released.
If anyone wants the tidy'd version let me know.
b/
-- Brad Collins <brad@chenla.org>, Bangkok, Thailand
_______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d
gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d
On Sun, Oct 31, 2004 at 10:47:31PM -0800, Andrew Sly wrote:
Just to clear up any confusion....
Our text of A Christmas Carol has already been moved into the new directory structure. It's "base directory" can be found at: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/4/46/
Duh! Sorry... It's probably time for me to stop typing now, and get some rest. -- Greg
On Sun, Oct 31, 2004 at 10:27:04PM -0800, Greg Newby wrote:
Strangely, this title doesn't have the usual filename mask in GUTINDEX.ALL. I'm cc'ing George to see about adding this.
The file has been reposted into the new filesystem, and its GUTINDEX entry is A Christmas Carol, A Ghost Story of Christmas, by Charles Dickens 46 which is correct.
Really finally: send updated files (or URLs) to errata AT pglaf.org , even if you didn't do all of the above. Thanks!
Please, please do not. There are a few cases when it is better to send a whole replacement file, but in my experience they amount to no more than 1% of all cases. Mostly, sending a whole file just causes a lot of unnecessary work and confusion. And please don't send a replacement HTML just because you like your HTML coded in a different style. The W3C sets quite enough standards, thank you: if everyone starts insisting on their own home-grown standards in addition, we'll never get anything useful done, even if open warfare does not break out between the various DIY standards-setters! And please, whatever you do, never send a file that has been put through any kind of automatic converter, tidier, rewrapper, or anything that programmatically alters the text. If you really feel that something like that needs to be used, then you really need to re-proof the whole thing. jim
A possible argument against using tidy as you mention is that it can have side effects the user does not intend. In the example you gave below, it appears to have replaced the numberic character entities the volunteer wanted to put in. Also, in the tidy executable I have, results are not always reliable in the contents of a "pre" tag; I have seen Tidy remove blank lines from within them before. When I'm preparing an html and plain text file for PG, I almost always do so in a way which has all the line endings in the same place, which makes it much easier for anyone in the future making corrections etc... I use tidy to check html, but not to produce a final version. I've just checked, and the file in question, while not necessarily the way I would have marked it up, _is_ valid HTML 4.01 Transitional, which matches what is required to add it to PG. Andrew On Mon, 1 Nov 2004, Brad Collins wrote:
I took a look at the source for the recent handsome re-release of PG's edition of A Christmas Carol (46-h).
The code is bit old, <p> tags are not terminated and the formating could be formated a bit better to make it more readable.
For example, the first paragraph looked like this:
<p> <span class="caps">Marley</span> was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
I ran the file through HTML-Tidy which turned it into this:
<p><span class="caps">Marley</span> was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.</p>
It took about ten seconds to open the, file run the file through tidy and save it. This resulted in a file which is consistent, standards compliant and far easier to read and process.
Open tags in HTML are an artifact of SGML which can confuse some browsers, processing software and limit what you can do with CSS.
I suggest that all PG html files be run through Tidy before being released.
participants (4)
-
Andrew Sly -
Brad Collins -
Greg Newby -
Jim Tinsley