Subject: Web-Dedicated Metacard

[Claude Lemmel]

> Message: 3
> Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 08:17:01 -1000
> Subject: Web-Dedicated Metacard
> From: Sannyasin Sivakatirswami <katir at hindu.org>
> To: metacard at lists.runrev.com
> Reply-To: metacard at lists.runrev.com
>
> I changed the thread on this because I am also following the
>
> MC-->PostGreSQL closely in its own right...
>
> OK, so agreed, we can use Metacard to provide content over the web.
>   I am doing it already in a very small way... but let's we discuss this
> in a larger context (we got 1.7 million visitors on just three of our
> domains in 2002... those are visitors, not hits)
>
> If one broaches the subject of putting in time to develop content for
> MC based delivery, saying
>
> "I can get 20 times the content ready for delivery in the same time it
> would take to get 1 unit of content out via HTML."  (I just spend a
> month of my time with another team member getting one book on line as
> HTML... amazing amount of human resources required to  do such a simple
> thing.)
>
> The answer is typically "Well, that's nice, but you are not going to
> reach as many people... how many are going to download your plug in?
> You still have to get them to go via a browser and download your
> stuff... why not just put it up in html in the first place."
>
> So, what kinds of strategies can anyone suggest to take this beyond the
> "consensus reality" barrier?

I have to deliver data to a large audience. This data is :
1000 pages of text
10000 pictures + caption

I want these data to be accessible through search engines like google or
altavista for schools with low end or old computers.
I also need for some institutions to deliver the same data on a cd-rom or on
a local ethernet network.

I decided to deliver this data as html for 2 reasons :

1) if my data is pure html, it can be searched through google or altavista ;
it means that my 1000 pages, 10000 captions and 10000 captions are available
for everyone on the web. If i put my data in a database or a stack and
deliver it through some server-side software, it will be available only to
people connected to my web-site, not to people searching for informations.

2) my data are readable without plugin on low end or old computers.

The efficient way for me is to program an metacard application for me to
edit the data. Does not matter if the text data are stored as fields, custom
props, text files, xml files or in an interfaced database (in fact at this
time i use text files or xml files). The main fact is that the data is
batch-edited in metacard.
I can for example export my data as a tagged text, make an orthographical
and grammatical correction in Word and get the data back. I can build
indexes, make hyperlinks...
Of course the pictures are in external files. But i can with metacard sort
the pictures by size, make most of the works of resizing and jpeg
compression, etc...