On Thursday, April 18, 2013 at 10:52 AM, Nathan Yergler wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 9:32 AM, Mike Linksvayer <[email protected]
> (mailto:[email protected])> wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 3:57 PM, Kat Walsh <[email protected]
> > (mailto:[email protected])> wrote:
> > > If we were to do this, the legal code would be maintained in a separate
> > > file
> > > from the HTML, in a format that maintained all of the essential
> > > information.
> > > For example, formatting such as bold or italic text that has legal
> > > significance, section headings, etc., would all be considered essential
> > > and
> > > part of the legal code itself. This legal code file would likely be
> > > maintained using Markdown[1], or something similar to it.
> > >
> > > The web page with the licenses would be generated from this legal code
> > > file,
> > > by converting it to HTML and adding non-legal code formatting, text, and
> > > navigational elements. However, since the legal code file would not have
> > > to
> > > be touched, it would be impossible to accidentally make a change to the
> > > legal code itself by changing other elements of the page.
> > >
> >
> >
> > I may have suggested something like this long ago, but I'd probably
> > stick to HTML as the canonical version now. That canonical HTML should
> > be as minimal as possible, just including enough structure and
> > annotation to make it possible for external CSS and Javascript to make
> > look pretty and dynamically add further annotation in a variety of
> > contexts, and for plain text to be generated without manual post
> > processing.
> >
>
>
> While you could continue to use javascript, etc for injecting that
> sort of customization, I think the burden for creating and maintaining
> that sort of code is greater than that for a script that takes a
> template document and runs in the actual content.
>
>
I very much agree. Client-side JS absolutely has its place, and I have no
problems with using it (heavily, if needed), but it's not some sort of escape
hatch for modifying pages without modifying the page that is served up. That's
just obfuscation, and it's harder to maintain.
> Regardless of the markup format for the "immutable" document, I think
> my primary concern is making it easy for a software agent to "follow
> its nose" from the license URI to the immutable legalcode. (I
> *thought* there was follow-your-nose markup from the deed to the
> legalcode, but I don't see it now, so maybe I'm mis-remembering.)
> Figuring out what the right predicate is shouldn't be super difficult,
> and would fit in the existing ecosystem.
Were you thinking of a link? "The license on this page was generated from
[link]" ?
>
> For what it's worth, we added support for "stripped down" legalcode in
> 2010 (I think). For example,
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode-plain. That
> file is generated from the static HTML, and having
> markdown/restructured text/something less expressive would have made
> life a little easier.
Hah.
Yeah, so that plain format could be close to being acceptable as a *source* if
we really want to use HTML (modulo the stylesheet and JS tags).
Dan
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