Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Nathan Yergler <nathan AT yergler.net>]

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 9:32 AM, Mike Linksvayer <ml AT gondwanaland.com> wrote:
> 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.

While you could continue to use javascript, etc for injecting that
sort of customization, I think the burden for creating and maintaining
that sort of code is greater than that for a script that takes a
template document and runs in the actual content.

Regardless of the markup format for the "immutable" document, I think
my primary concern is making it easy for a software agent to "follow
its nose" from the license URI to the immutable legalcode. (I
*thought* there was follow-your-nose markup from the deed to the
legalcode, but I don't see it now, so maybe I'm mis-remembering.)
Figuring out what the right predicate is shouldn't be super difficult,
and would fit in the existing ecosystem.

For what it's worth, we added support for "stripped down" legalcode in
2010 (I think). For example,
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode-plain. That
file is generated from the static HTML, and having
markdown/restructured text/something less expressive would have made
life a little easier.

NRY

>
> Mike
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