On March 5, 2004 at 01:43, Jeff Breidenbach wrote: > Out of curiosity, I took a uncustomized MHonArc generated message page > and replaced all the MHonArc markup with HTML <div> tags. For > example, turning <!--X-Body-of-Message--> into <div > id=X-Body-of-Message>
You are mixing two things: Layout markup and what mhonarc needs to properly edit pages. The <!--X- ... --> comments are used to delimit the main structural components of a message page, and are independent of what the markup is. Ideally, they should processing instructions, <?...>, but at the time mhonarc was first developed, browsers did not support processing instructions, so comments were used. Now, with the layout resources, you can insert <div> tags where appropriate to define the CSS layout structure of the page (something mhonarc does not care about). If you look at the default resource file that is provided with mharc, <http://www.mhonarc.org/mharc/doc/file/common.mrc.txt>, you will see that it puts <div> tags and define class attributes for other tags to facilitate stylesheet markup, <http://www.mhonarc.org/mharc/html/stylesheet.css.in.dist>. The mhonarc.org archives use mharc, and the bulk of the visual style is done via a stylesheet. I took this approach since for large archives, modifying a stylesheet is much easier to do than rebuild all archive pages to make a style change. I know you have this same issue with mail-archive.com. > So... I am looking for comments before I dive further with this > approach. Does the idea seem generally sound? Is this the general > trend and might MHonArc someday in the distant future abandon the HTML > comment based semantic markup of message pages, switching to something > style sheets can also key off off? The comments will always be needed since they stay immutable and are required for doing archive updates (they could change to processing instructions in the future). The real question is if the default layout resource settings should include <div> and/or similiar style-based structures? I have considered it in the past, but have not done anything about it. For now, individual users will have to customize the layout resources. --ewh
