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Subject:Converting Publications into Web Pages (long) From:Simon North <north -at- DIRECT -dot- IAF -dot- NL> Date:Sat, 24 Jun 1995 21:48:54 LCL
Boy, it seems like I've been lurking for ever; it's nice to be back.
I am a technical author, but for the last two years or so I have
been in the almost unique position of being the sole Webmaster
within a 1200+ workstation network. This network has almost no
contact outside the company (we do have e-mail and a UUCP Usenet
link - and a few people have limited FTP and non-graphic (Lynx)
WWW access), but this has not in any way detracted from its value
as a means of internal communication that bridges the gap between
proprietory presentation material and the informality of e-mail.
This is, IMHO, the future.
What started as a personal toy (Mosaic 1.0 on my workstation) grew
to an interesting little FrameMaker to HTML conversion project
using Cern's WebMaker. (We had been asked to investigate converting
FrameMaker ISO9000 documentation into EBT's DynaText and I thought
it could be done much quicker and easier using WebMaker and
putting it into HTML rather than full-scale SGML). To echo Chet's
point, HTML is not good for storage - but that is the fantastic
thing about WebMaker; it takes you a couple of days to write the
configuration file that drives the conversion process but you only
do it once. After that, conversion becomes as simple as printing
and you keep your maintenance focus directed towards the original
FrameMaker file, ignoring the HTML output in the same way as you
ignore your PostScript output.
The distribution of ISO9000 documentation is a perfect use for a
Web. I found, though, that I quickly wanted to do more than just
browse the documents following simple links - I wanted to be able
to 'serve' documents. So, since this was done largely on my own
initiative without any direct budget or support, I recruited a
couple of internship students and we put together a sort of local
system. Each time someone starts up Mosaic, our shell script also
starts up a local HTTP server on that workstation. It does mean
some cruddy URL addresses have to be entered (usually long strings
like 'http://localhost:8080/' etc.) but this is a small price to
be paid. I now have clickable images, e-mail interfaces, you can
access the Unix on-line help information ('man' pages) through a
dynamic troff-to-html conversion, I have Perl CGI scripts to do
almost everything you could dream of (internal telephone book
included).
One small success led to others, and the training centre now
officially distributes its course catalog via the web, the
software process improvement group is an active client, we are
adding one or two individuals and at least one project every week.
On Friday last I added in tools to convert flat database files
automatically into web pages ... and we are only just beginning. I
now have a beta test version of Grif/INRIA's Symposia running -
this allows you to actually remotely edit the HTML files and send
them back to the source (webbed workgroup documents!). Every week
there is something new to add, some new possibility discovered.
I have been writing on-line documentation since 1972; this is,
without question THE most exciting development since we started
using VDU' instead of line terminals.
Some technical details: I'm using Mosaic 2.4 (I haven't got around
to modifying and compiling the source code for 2.6 yet so we
haven't done too much HTML 2.0/3.0 under Unix yet, although I use
Mosaic 2.0.0beta4 under MS-Windows at home - P.S. I hate Netscape!).
At home I have WHTTPD to play with, but this system uses the Cern
httpd server - I liked the way it allowed be to distribute the
system better; i.e. I use htimage instead of imagemap since you
can pass the imagemap config file as a parameter and NOT have to
constantly keep tinkering with a central config file. Underneath is
SunOS 4.1.3 with X11R5 and Motif. For scripting I use Perl 5.0 and a
LOT of shareware. All in all I think I must have written less than a
thousand lines of code myself (read my lips - I AM NOT A PROGRAMMER).
I have built up a massive library of tools, tips, programs: want a
WYSIWYG HTML for Unix - try ASHE (A Simple HTML Editor) gives
Mosaic-like WYSIWYG, for MS-Windows, try a package called Live
Markup. If you want a good beginners guide (and for not-so
beginners), check out the HTML dictionary I helped write which you
can get from ftp://ftp.demon.co.uk/pub/doc/html/html.zip or http://union.ncsa.uiuc.edu/html
I would love to exchange ideas and thoughts on this with the group.
