Scribe to HTML: Scribe <I>vs.</I> HTML

Producing HTML Documents with Scribe

1. Scribe vs. HTML

HTML documents are usually short, typically no more than a few text pages. Each document is named by a Universal Resource Locator (URL) that looks like:

http://host.domain/path/file

A document can contain pointers to other documents by associating its URL with some text (called the anchor) in the document. When the user clicks on the anchor, the corresponding document is retrieved and displayed.

The World Wide Web consists of the entire collection of such documents, connected by hypertext links.

A typical Scribe document differs from an HTML document in several ways:

A Scribe document is usually much longer than an HTML document. An HTML equivalent would consist of several small documents, connected by hypertext links.
Scribe documents are usually read in a linear order, one section after another. HTML documents are often browsed in random order. It is easy to get lost.
The only indexing information in a Scribe document is the table of contents and, possibly, the index. HTML documents are usually very richly cross-referenced. Even the Joy of Cooking pales by comparison.

There are two levels of capability for producing HTML documents. The simplest just produces an HTML version of the manuscript file. In addition, with a little work, a structured set of HTML documents can be produced from the manuscript file.

Glenn Trewitt, trewitt@pa.dec.com