

Unwebbable - Not all documents can be a web page - whalesalad
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/unwebbable/

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shizcakes
"Nobody seriously intends screenplays on the web to have the same function
they do in real life: getting read, getting optioned or bought, and getting
shot. All of that happens on paper, not on Firefox."

Why not? It's pretty straightforward to paginate something or divide it like a
physical page. In the case of screenplays, the 'page' was engineered around
because it was a physical limitation. The author's example of Final draft and
it's default format of XML is exactly what I am talking about - scripting that
to be presented in HTML is not difficult.

I feel like this entire article is complaining about HTML and HTML5, while
reaching for tenuous examples and not really accomplishing much.

~~~
jsonscripter
Interestingly, Celtx (<http://celtx.com/>) is a screenplay editor built out of
Firefox.

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mrshoe
I might be an ill-trained author, but I don't mind writing

    
    
        <h2 class="stage-direction">
    

instead of

    
    
        <stagedirection>
    

I think (X)HTML + CSS is extensible enough for me. The former is only slightly
less readable than the latter for maintainers of my code, and my paramount
goal for the rendered document can be achieved equally well with both.

~~~
roc
Well I'm _certainly_ an ill-trained author and it seems to me that the details
of the markup are wholly irrelevant to the people actually writing and making
movies.

The screenwriter should be chugging along with (e.g.) a dialect of markdown
that keeps the details the hell out of his way. Whether the markup that comes
out the other side looks like XML or HTML just doesn't matter.

And "1 page = 1 minute" is a dodgy heuristic* that could easily be supplanted
by software that could process the source and _know_ what's set direction,
scene changes, dialogue, etc.

* "1 page = 1 minute" has long since gone from handy heuristic to self-reinforcing delusion.

Today, if a screenwriter is selling an average (hundred minutes, more or less)
movie, he will _ensure_ that his script is a hundred pages (more or less).
He'll tweak margins, font sizes, spacing, descriptions and more. He doesn't
want his masterpiece stigmatized when it makes the studio rounds just because
it showed up thirty pages either side of proper.

And so it goes.

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ergasia
Of course all documents can be a web page. Sumerian clay tablets can be a web
page. Does it make sense to introduce hyperlinks and other markup to Sumerian
clay tablets? Not to me, but that's something I don't feel the need to worry
about.

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IsaacSchlueter
Wow, alistapart has jumped the shark, I fear.

This article is just complaining about a whole host of non-problems. He's just
made the case that there should be a microformat for screenplays, and a tool
to convert the Final Draft XML format into said microformat, and some CSS to
style it nicely. The <hr> tag is pretty much a perfect analog to the
screenplay page break.

As for MathML, there are authoring tools that a) convert handwritten math
equations to mathml and b) convert mathml to images in web pages. People are
actually using these.

This article just made me angry. _OH NO_ , I thought as loudly as possible.
_PEOPLE ARE WRONG ON THE INTERNET!_

While people like Joe Clark decry the shortcomings of our tools, the rest of
us are using these tools to get real world things done.

Also, the picture looks like a penis. Srsly.

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dlevine
Internal representation is different from display representation. So long as
it looks good on a screen, I don't really care what the markup looks like.

You can then represent it internally in any format that you want. XML sounds
good, because it is completely general, but that generality can also be a
curse (due to its self descriptiveness, it is pretty much never the most
compact way to represent structured data).

Screenwriters are old fashioned, but will definitely come around over time
(just like filmmakers are slowly switching to digital). There are already web
apps that allow you to write screenplays online - <http://www.scripped.com> is
one. I'm sure that, in the long-term, the collaborative aspects of the web
will trump any technical difficulties.

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_pius
This example seems almost unbelievably bad.

Screenplays have well defined rules of organization and formatting that
actually lend themselves nicely to being represented in HTML.

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ErrantX
Actually this is in interesting point. One that, I suppose, XHTML was supposed
to fix (but never did).

Developers are getting more and more into (it seems) semantic content. I like
that - but I never really bother because, as this article points out, Html is
too locked in anyway there is little point.

(incidentally it took me a while to take the article seriously... the image
they used looks, well, like a penis...)

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JournalistHack
Although the title has link-bait value, if taken seriously I would say that it
basically reveals an author with limited vision.

In my experience there are nearly _no_ documents (that have any significant
value to me) that I _would not_ want to see "webified". I love the options
provided - to excerpt, cut/paste, add links, etc. Needless to say... no big
scribd fan here.

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csbartus
Don't know much about the author and don't really understand his points ..
I've always wondered who are writing and reading the List Apart .. For me
looks like literature about web design and web frontend technology which is
_weird_

