Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Mike Linksvayer <ml AT gondwanaland.com>]

On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 3:57 PM, Kat Walsh <kat AT creativecommons.org> wrote:
> If we were to do this, the legal code would be maintained in a separate file
> from the HTML, in a format that maintained all of the essential information.
> For example, formatting such as bold or italic text that has legal
> significance, section headings, etc., would all be considered essential and
> part of the legal code itself. This legal code file would likely be
> maintained using Markdown[1], or something similar to it.
>
> The web page with the licenses would be generated from this legal code file,
> by converting it to HTML and adding non-legal code formatting, text, and
> navigational elements. However, since the legal code file would not have to
> be touched, it would be impossible to accidentally make a change to the
> legal code itself by changing other elements of the page.

I may have suggested something like this long ago, but I'd probably
stick to HTML as the canonical version now. That canonical HTML should
be as minimal as possible, just including enough structure and
annotation to make it possible for external CSS and Javascript to make
look pretty  and dynamically add further annotation in a variety of
contexts, and for plain text to be generated without manual post
processing.

Mike