By now, it seems that the web has become the platform to share information across all industries. In fact, many young professionals these days have no idea how documents and information exchanged hands prior to the web.
The truth of the matter is that, over the years, painstaking efforts have gone into the organization and layout of content in the printed format. In some cases, a tangible, printed document can’t be converted to live online (as HTML) without major transformation.
This post is actually inspired by a blog titled “Unwebbable” by Joe Clark.
Clark states: “A sheet of paper provides complete authorial freedom, but that freedom can translate poorly to the coarse semantics of HTML”. It really does seem that we sometimes force information into the constraints of HTML syntax.
Clark uses film screenplays as a working example of this dilemma. Screenplays are custom-engineered so that one printed page is equivalent to one minute of onscreen time. And through a refined structure of indents and capitalization, it’s easy to scan the pages of a screenplay and quickly decipher the contents.
The problem is that the term “page”, as used on the web, is strictly metaphorical. Web pages, in most cases, are not restricted by length or amount of content. Also, extensible HTML (XHTML) is really not completely extensible. HTML does not have enough tags for the semantics of a screenplay, which would require that nearly everything have its own tag.
Other print formats that don’t translate well to the web: Mastheads, callouts & sidebars, footnotes, math & science notation.
Will we continue to extend digital formats to accommodate every industry-specific document? Will websites attempt to emulate print formats and scientific notation through HTML, XML, or javascript?
The natural solution that comes to mind is XML. Through the use of custom XML document-types, we may be able to accomplish this going forward.
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