Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Dan Mills <dan AT creativecommons.org>]

Hi,

The licenses still contain too much information which is not actually part of the licenses. Just open that link, view source, and behold.

Of course we could parse it, but how would you decide what you can remove and what is part of the license? We need to minimize the amount of code that has such decisions embedded in it.

Dan

On Thursday, April 18, 2013 at 10:45 AM, Nathan Kinkade wrote:

All of the CC licenses validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. There are

a lot of really great XML parsers out there for manipulating such

documents. It would be trivial for us to clean up the HTML in the 4.0

licenses to more minimal, using better nesting of id and classes so we

can use more accurate CSS selectors, and _javascript_ can more reliably

navigate the DOM. I have already started this when I put together the

Draft 3 of the 4.0 licenses by giving a unique ID to each section and

subsection:

http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/drafts/by-sa_4.0d3.html#s3a1B

Nathan

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 1:30 PM, Dan Mills <dan AT creativecommons.org> wrote:

Hi Bjorn & Maarten,

I think you're missing a key point that Kat is making: the legal team is

looking to change the pages that the licenses are on, to add translation

links. I also know that they are thinking about ways of including the

licenses inside the deeds, which would also require some changes to the

license pages.

So the point is not "what do you think of Markdown" in a vacuum, it's: what

format can we store that contains only the absolute minimum to be

considered to be part of the licenses, so that we can build tooling to style

it appropriately depending on the context.

We could obviously write tooling that takes the current HTML and transforms

it, but such tooling would need to be highly content-aware: it would need to

know which parts of the HTML file it can remove or change, and which ones it

cannot. We likely can't eliminate that completely regardless of the format,

but we should try to minimize it.

Markdown seems pretty close to the minimal format that lets us express what

we need. We could also continue to use HTML, but we'd need to use a minimal

subset--not what we use now (which includes images, scripts, links not part

of the license, etc).

So, looking at your (Maarten's) four points with this in mind:

1. Both markdown and HTML (HyperText Markup Language) are markup

languages, it seems silly to convert one markup language into another.

This is not a criteria for choosing a format to use.

2. Adding markdown to the infrastructure creates extra dependancies on

a conversion between markdown and HTML, one that will probably takes

more skill and time than doing these licenses immediately in html

It does, but the alternative is an HTML->HTML transformation, which is

arguably more complex because HTML is so expressive. We could make it work

if we enforced a very limited subset of HTML as the input, though.

3. Markdown is not a standard and we cannot rely on it to stay the

same, HTML is.

This is not actually true, the history of HTML is littered with examples:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_%28Non-standard_HTML%29#Deprecated_HTML_elements

But you're right that Markdown is not currently led by any large standards

body. I think there are two mitigating factors:

(a) The primary uses for these files will be:

- to be transformed for general consumption, and

- to serve as an archive.

The first is internal to CC only, the second requires at most that the file

be readable at some point in the future without our help. In other words, we

do not need every client (browser) to natively understand the format.

(b) Markdown is so incredibly simple, it's hard to imagine a future where

someone will be unable to read it:

http://etherpad.creativecommons.org/p/markdown-example

4. Markdown basically is short hand for HTML, again why would we use it?

Simplicity, and as a forcing function to get us to stop putting in

extraneous content in our licenses.

Dan

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