ACCU - About the Bookreviews section

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About the Bookreviews section

How the review section is constructed

The Reviews and indexes

The reviews are stored as SGML and are converted to HTML by Perl scripts as and when new reviews are added. SGML is a method of organising information by it's meaning and structure, rather than focussing on it's appearance (as with a word processor or HTML editor). For more information on SGML, see http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/. Storing the base documents as SGML future proofs the information and allows easy conversion to any other format.
Fundamental changes can be made to the appearance of the reviews simply by changing a few lines of Perl rather than editing 2000+ HTML files.

The reviews are indexed by Reviewer, Publisher, C Vu, Subject, Title and full text search via htdig. In addition, each review contains cross references to other reviews.

A small CGI program provides context sensitive back & forward buttons.

Compressed Archives of reviews

Probably of less interest to those with the privilege of free local telephone calls.

In Europe, and especially the UK, we have to pay our telephone company large sums of money for the time we spend on-line.

Compressed archives of reviews are generated on the fly complete with a section index. Three different compression methods are supported: .zip, .tar.gz and .tar.Z formats.

The right tools for the job

All development for this site was completed on a Linux Slackware workstation. The use of Perl allowed the SGML -> HTML conversion scripts to be developed rapidly.

Problems and Comments

Please contact the Webmaster, Peter Hamilton.