25 Dec
2008
25 Dec
'08
8:41 a.m.
Phil Budne <phil at ultimate.com> wrote:
Tim Shoppa wrote:
True, the concepts at the core of the various RUNOFFs are all pretty
similar.
But by the 80's in between the PDP-10 and -11 there were some pretty
wacky variations. If the features of the variations are used extensively
they get in the way. I haven't tried making a "universal translator"
in a while, maybe I can muster some time over the holidays :-).
A future project would probably be a way of
turning all the different
variants of RUNOFF (and the variants span 3 decades at least, 4 or 5
decades if you count those who still used it in the 90's and 2000's)
into HTML with good invariant content-based subreferences.
I'm not sure how much (if any) penetration the new fangled "Digital
Standard Runoff" made in the PDP-10 world. Other than that, I can't
recall having much trouble formatting documents of all ages with
1980's vintage PDP-10 RUNOFF (and I liked looking at old stuff, even
then). I remember finding some TENEX design documents when I was at
DEC. I recently regave them to Dan Murphy, we talked about how to
render them for the web, and I remembered a package I once used that
reads RUNOFF and outputs troff:
ftp://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/darwin/runoff.troff
Sources for manuals probably have directives for producing indices,
which would be useful for producing HTML anchors. But the MACLISP manual wasn't written in RUNOFF,
was it?!
It was a good example because it was so big, but I'm sure that
like most of the surrounding stuff it is sourced in INFO. info2html I see
already exists, and it actually knows about all the nodes etc.,
which would make great anchors. I haven't tried taking any 80's era
info files and running them through. At least some of the files
in the archive that end with an .info extension are in fact info
files that have already been rendered into something for a line
printer.
For better or worse, it's almost necessary to render all documents
into html because if I serve them up with a .doc extension the browser
thinks they're MS Word, if I serve them up with a .mac extension the
browser think's they're some Quicktime file, etc. Mime-types works
with sane browsers but 95% of the world is using Internet Exploder
which decides to ignore mime-types most of the time. Very very frustrating.
I eventually gave up on even serving them up with correct Mime-types because
only a small fraction of browsers pays attention to those fields and
all the others instead give precedence to the apparent extension. At
this point I feel like part of the problem because I gave up on doing
the right mime-type!
Tim.
Tim.