MadMode

As I said in a July 2000 message to www-rdf-interest:

There are very few data formats I trust... when I use when I use the computer to capture my knowledge, I pretty much stick to plain text, XML (esp XHTML, or at least HTML that tidy can turn into XHTML for me), RCS/CVS, and RFC822/MIME. I use JPG, PNG, and PDF if I must, but not for capturing knowledge for exchange, revision, etc.

And as I explained in a 1994 essay, converting from LaTeX is hard, so I try not to write in LaTeX either.

The Web conference has instructions for submitting PDF using LaTeX or MS Word and (finally!) for submitting XHTML. (The WWW2006 paper CSS stylesheet is horrible... who wants to read 9pt times on screen?!?! Anyway...) So when the IRW 2006 organizers told me they'd like a PDF version of my paper in that style, I dusted off my Transforming XHTML to LaTeX and BibTeX tools and got to work.

My paper cites a number of W3C specs, including HTML 4. The W3C tech reports index/digital library has an associated bibliography generator. I fed it http://www.w3.org/TR/html401 and it generated a nice bibliographic reference from an RDF data set. I'm interested in the ongoing citation microformats work that might make that transformation lossless, since I need not just XHTML, but BibTex. What I'm doing currently is adding some bibtex vocabulary in class and rel attributes:

<dt class="TechReport">
<a name="HTML4" id="HTML4">[HTML4]</a>
</dt>

<dd><span class="author">Le Hors, Arnaud and Raggett, Dave and
Jacobs, Ian</span> Editors,
<cite> <a
href="http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224">HTML 4.01
Specification</a> </cite>,
<span class="institution">W3C</span> Recommendation,
24 <span class="month">December</span> <span class="year">1999</span>,
<tt class="number">http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224</tt>.
<a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html401" title="Latest version of
HTML 4.01 Specification">Latest version</a> available at
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401 .</dd>

When run thru my xh2bib.xsl, out comes:

@TechReport{HTML4,
title = "{
HTML 4.01 Specification
}",
    author = {Le Hors, Arnaud
and Raggett, Dave
and Jacobs, Ian},
    institution = {W3C},
    month = {December},
    year = {1999},
    number = {http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224},
    howpublished = { \url{http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224} }
}

I think I should be using editor = rather than author = but that didn't work the 1st time I tried and I haven't investigated further.

In any case, I'm reasonably happy with the PDF output.