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oduwsdl / MemGator

A Memento Aggregator CLI and Server in Go
https://memgator.cs.odu.edu/api.html
MIT License
56 stars 11 forks source link

Feature Request: Provide an HTML formatted TimeMap endpoint #131

Open machawk1 opened 4 years ago

machawk1 commented 4 years ago

Perma.cc offers one, e.g., https://perma.cc/timemap/html/http://www.example.org

The use case is for a more human readable format alternative to the currently supported formats.

ibnesayeed commented 4 years ago

We discussed this matter offline in the early days of MemGator development. While implementing this would be easy, one issue that needs to be resolved is the structure and attributes of the markup. HTML is for documents, not for data, so any structure would be ad-hoc in nature. On the contrary, XML can be more strict and well suited to transport data. Another issue with HTML is, should we provide a complete HTML document along with header and body elements or just the fragment which contains the TimeMap data.

machawk1 commented 4 years ago

With regard to structure, Custom Elements would provide a basis for semantics entries to be displayed.

ibnesayeed commented 4 years ago

I don't see Custom Elements being any helpful in this case, instead it will bring an added overhead of the element definition. We should not be after a specific rendition of the data, but semantically carrying the data while meaningful consumption and styling decisions should be left to the consumer of the data.