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by afavour 191 days ago
Sounds like XML and XSL would be a great fit here. Shame it’s being deprecated.

But you could still use HTML. Elements with a dash in are reserved for custom elements (that is, a new standardised element will never take that name) so you could do:

    <paper-author-list>
      <paper-author />
    </paper-author-list>
And it would be valid HTML. Then you’d style it with CSS, with

    paper-author {
      display: list-item;
    }
And so on.
2 comments
bawolff 191 days ago
Nothing is stopping you from using server side XSL. I personally dont think its a great fit, but people need to stop acting like xsl has been wiped from the face of the earth.
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afavour 191 days ago
Yes but we’re specifically talking about a display format here. Something requiring a server side transform before being viewable by a user is a clear step backwards.
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bawolff 191 days ago
How so? I can't think of any advantage to having client side xsl over outputting two files, in this context.
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afavour 191 days ago
The discussion is about the form in which you share papers. With HTML you just share the HTML file, it opens instantly on basically any device.

If you distribute the paper as XML with an XSLT transform you need to run something that’ll perform that transform before you can read the paper. No matter whether that transform happens on the server or on the client it’s still an extra complication in the flow of sharing information.

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xworld21 191 days ago
Indeed, LaTeXML (the software used by arXiv) converts LaTeX to a semantic XML document which is turned to HTML using primarily XSLT!
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