Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Maarten Zeinstra <mz AT kl.nl>]

Hi Greg,

I just drafted the same email to Dan:

"You are making me curious. Could you give a either a mockup or a schematic 
of how you envision this then? 

Also it appears that most of us oppose this from a technical point of view 
whereas you are saying that there are reason from legal that are important 
here as well. Could you explain those view in a way that I can understand 
them?"

Cheers,

Maarten

-- 
Kennisland | www.kennisland.nl | t +31205756720 | m +31643053919 | @mzeinstra




On Apr 18, 2013, at 19:57 , Greg Grossmeier <greg AT grossmeier.net> wrote:

> I guess the miscommunication here is:
> what tooling will you build that needs to use something other than HTML
> to display the license?
> 
> What use-case do you have in mind, Dan?
> 
> Greg
> 
> <quote name="Dan Mills" date="2013-04-18" time="10:50:26 -0700">
>> 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 
>>> (mailto: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
>>>> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> cc-devel mailing list
>>>> cc-devel AT lists.ibiblio.org (mailto:cc-devel AT lists.ibiblio.org)
>>>> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-devel
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
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> 
> 
> -- 
> | Greg Grossmeier            GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E |
> | http://grossmeier.net           A18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |
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