Document Presentation Format Decisions

HTML

• One file or multiple files.
• Navigation Frame or Outline.
• Explicit hyperlinks.
• Use of highlighting on various elements.
• You can control page-breaks for printing.
• Footnotes will be endnotes.

PDF=Portable Document Format

• Adobe Distiller
• Ghost Script

Envoy

• WordPerfect

Postscript

• MAC OS
• UNIX
• Ghostscript

Native File Formats

• WordPerfect File
• MicroSoft Word File
• Rich Text Format-RTF File

Assuming you use HTML:

• Use a DOCTYPE declaration.
• Use MetaData

There are many metadata schemes:

• The Dublin Core was developed by OCLC and has been extended with the Warwick Framework and the Canberra Qualifiers. It is based on common cataloging statements and has a base of 15 identifiers.
• The Text Encoding Initiative - TEI has been developed for use in textual analysis.
• The Platform for Internet Content Selection was developed by the W3 to allow for rating of content. It can also allow code signing, privacy and intellectual property rights management.

Why Metadata?

• It is easier to search the metadata than the whole document.
• Metadata can be held in a metadata depository.
• Will allow for a focused search on elements.
• Can be attached to images, databases, and PDF documents.

Which Search Engines Support MetaData?

• Search Engine Watch has a list of search engines which use MetaData.

What is the Future of MetaData?

The future of MetaData is the Resource Description Framework, an XML application that describes metadata and allows for relationships between metadata. See, R. Iannella, "Application of RDF for extensible Dublin Core metadata".

What is RDF?

RDF is a "foundation for processing metadata; it provides interoperability between applications that exchange machine-understandable information on the Web."

See, RDF Tools for an example of the Dublin Core in RDF.

Tools to create Dublin Core and other types of MetaData

• DC-Dot outputs DC in RDF, HTML2 and HTML4.
• REGGIE is a Java application for generating MetaData.
• PrismEd is another Java MetaData generator.

Stylesheets

• Cascading Style Sheets - CSS1 and CSS2 have been developed primarily to handle presentation issues in HTML3.2 and HTML4.
• Extensible Style Sheets - XSL will be used under XML.

Stylesheets allow for greater display capabilities that can be used to provide visual or auditory cues to the document user. They can also be used to extend the logical markup of text. The later should probably be done with XML and not with the stylesheet languages. At this time, using HTML 4.0, "creative" use of the class qualifier can give some greater capabilities to the document creator.