OT: HTML as source format (was: wiki)

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Sun, Apr 03, 2011 at 10:55:57AM +0100, Michael Dorrington wrote:
> olafBuddenhagen@gmx.net wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 11:15:21AM +0100, Svante Signell wrote:

> >> Why not plain .html?
> > 
> > HTML was never meant to be writte by hand.
> 
> Never?

Right.

I'm not sure where exactly I read that, but it was definitely in the
context of W3C, and I'm pretty certain it is the official position of
the original HTML creators.

HTML was meant to be an internal format, generated by authoring tools.
Only nobody managed to create authoring tools that don't generate total
crap... So everyone taking web design seriously writes it by hand after
all, although that was never intended :-)

However, for simple content that doesn't require elaborate layout, input
formats such as markdown (or asciidoc, or reStructuredText, or any of
the various custom syntaxes of other wiki systems) do very well :-)

-antrik-