Date: Mon, 3 May 93 07:55:24 +0200
From: aronsson@lysator.liu.se

Hi,
  My name is Lars Aronsson.  I co-maintain the WWW service at
www.lysator.liu.se port 7500 (see file Main.html).  I have read
Tim's Style Guide and Robert's "reader's comment" using X Mosaic.

First, Tim, I have told you before that this is a good thing.
However, after having written my first HTML structured documents,
I must add that the Style Guide deals a little too much with
basic issues that could be summarized as "use your brain".
There are some issues, like those Robert mentions, where we need
to find answers, and the present Style Guide does not provide them.

Robert, my experience is very similar to yours.  I have some large
texts in plain ASCII that I consider to add to our WWW service, and
I might also consider writing new texts with WWW in mind.

The concept of a tree structure as a base for hypertexts is good.
It is used for example in GNU Emacs info documents.  The problem,
as Robert states, is to maintain the Up, Previous, Next links.
Also, with HTML/WWW every "Document" is a separate file, which
makes maintenance more complicated.  In GNU Emacs info, all
"Documents" in a "structure" (all chapters in a book) are contained
in one file.

Some of the Previous and Next links in Tim's Style Guide are missing.
This makes me believe you maintain those links manually, Tim.

I have made a prototype program in C++ that reads a GNU Emacs outline
format file and creates many HTML files where the Up, Previous, and
Next links are added.  Every section of the outline file becomes a
separate HTML file.  All I do is to maintain the large outline file.
The children of a document are automatically listed in a <ul> list
in the parent document.

Robert, I can only agree with your comments about the Back function of
X Mosaic.  The history paths get too long for the Back button to be
useful.  The history paths should be shortcut whenever possible.

Lars Aronsson
     Aronsson@Lysator.LiU.SE