Essays as XHTML 

I'm working on an essay for college at the moment. I hate using Word - and OpenOffice is just a fairly naff Word clone. I can't seem to get LaTeX to work on my PC. I can't for the life of me figure out how to write DocBook XML (way too complex!).

So I'm now writing my essays as beautiful XHTML. But here's the real killer bit.

I've come up with a semantic format for storing bibliography entries. And I'm going to build some application layer on the top of it. Once I've got some time, I'm going to produce a parser to turn my bibliography entries in to XML, JSON and RDF/XML.

Once I've done that I'm going to explore how to make the process of writing essays easier. Meanwhile, I'm in a great situation at the moment - I've got my essay stored as pure HTML on a USB flash drive.

Firefox on the Mac has a really good print setup. And once you've got your head around hacking little bits of bothersome CSS (hanging indents should be easier), it becomes very easy to just have a template, bash in a bunch of text in to P elements, hit save, hit reload in Firefox.

I'll be releasing the template in the next few days.

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