Raw XML
There’s a new build of Chimera out: 0.6 (2002122004). I’ve been using it all day and it hasn’t crashed yet. It does do this freaky thing where the preference icons go blurry at times, but that’s not enough to drive me back to Mozilla 1.3a.
One thing my new Chimera does better than its heftier parent, Mozilla, is display raw XML with CSS. It did better with this example from the Apple developers site. Maybe my Mozilla problem (that the titles were not turned into links) was just a bug in the most recent alpha release; Mozilla claims to have extensive XML support.
You’re probably in skim mode by now. If you’ve never understood the appeal of XML, take a look at A List Apart’s painless introduction to Using XML. If you know enough about XML to fear the acronym proliferation to which it inevitably leads, check out XSL Considered Harmful, an old article alleging that XSL would set XML back two or three years. I think the author’s dire predictions came true with a vengeance.
My sick fascination with XML stems from my dreams of an ideal content management system. Right now, my fiction is divided between plain text files with ASC headers, hand-converted HTML versions with handmade indices, and LaTeX source for my original fiction. I keep notes and related information in plain text files, in HTML pages (my own, or downloaded from useful Voyager sites), or in the TWiki I run locally on my Mac. TWiki is a nice solution, but it’s perl-based and annoyingly slow at times. I’d rather have something I could edit in Emacs, view in a browser, and convert to other formats easily. I know XML is the way to go, but getting there requires more free time than I’ve had to spare lately.
I’m not looking for fancy ways of combining XML and XHTML, though that sounds cool. I’d like to start with a simple DTD and a basic CSS stylesheet to go with it, so I can view my own stories on my own lovely mac using my own standards-compliant browsers. Conversion to web and printable forms are future goals, as is FicML for all. I’m hoping this teixlite tutorial will get me set up locally.