{"id":161,"date":"2003-01-06T19:17:56","date_gmt":"2003-01-07T00:17:56","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=161"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T04:00:00","slug":"pure_content","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2003\/01\/06\/pure_content\/","title":{"rendered":"Pure Content?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/diveintomark.org\/archives\/2003\/01\/05.html#poisoning_the_envelope\">Mark Pilgrim<\/a> sums up my thoughts on the utility of pure content:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/diveintomark.org\/archives\/2003\/01\/05.html#poisoning_the_envelope\">I wrote <a href=\"http:\/\/diveintopython.org\/\">Dive Into Python<\/a> in DocBook <acronym title=\"eXtensible Markup Language\">XML<\/acronym>, and I maintain a set of <acronym title=\"eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation\">XSLT<\/acronym> scripts to convert the raw XML into HTML, <acronym title=\"Portable Document Format\">PDF<\/acronym>, Word, HTMLHelp, and plain text.  Actually, my scripts are just customizations of larger, more complex scripts maintained by Norman Walsh.  Overall, I&#8217;ve spent more time maintaining those scripts that I have writing the book.  But my content is pure!  Was it worth it?  No, not really.  Mostly I ended up using HTML as an intermediate format anyway, so a semantic HTML source document and a few well-placed regular expressions would have served my purposes just as well.  In fact, this is what I did to produce the PDF version of <a href=\"http:\/\/diveintoaccessibility.org\/\">Dive Into Accessibility<\/a>.<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>Ironically, I was just looking at his <a href=\"http:\/\/diveintopython.org\/\">Dive Into Python<\/a> as an example of a successful use of single-sourcing from DocBook and concluded that it was a lot of extra work for few real advantages over <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latex-project.org\">LaTeX<\/a>. I&rsquo;m still looking for a <em>good<\/em> format for single-sourcing. Both LaTeX and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.adobe.com\/products\/framemaker\/main.html\">FrameMaker<\/a> have worked well for me, but to get good results I have to use a restricted feature set and write scripts to post-process the output.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Pilgrim sums up my thoughts on the utility of pure content: I wrote Dive Into Python in DocBook XML, and I maintain a set of XSLT scripts to convert the raw XML into HTML, PDF, Word, HTMLHelp, and plain text. Actually, my scripts are just customizations of larger, more complex scripts maintained by Norman [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}