The HTML Translation Project

Introduction

This guide has traditionally been available in two formats: plain text, digest format (distributed to the comp.ai.genetic and comp.answers USENET newsgroups), and Postscript format, available by FTP from various sources (notably ENCORE - see Q15.3).

It has long been an aim of the authors of this guide that it should be availble in HTML format too, and readily accessible on the World Wide Web. Tom Fine, in Ohio, has done a very good job of providing a site which contains many FAQs, converted into HTML format. However, while this conversion pulls out main links (e.g. to FTP and HTTP sites), it does not always produce useful links within the contents of the FAQ.

Converting the whole of this guide into HTML code would be an enormous task (which is why we put it off for so long!) But in November 1995 we began this translation project. We devised ways in which the original source for the guide (which happens to be in troff format) could be converted to HTML automatically. This means that we can still generate the plain text and Postscript versions of the FAQ just the same as before, but we can generate this HTML version too - all from the same basic (troff) source.

What's Included?

The HTML version of the FAQ includes the following features:

Links to glossary entries, e.g. EVOLUTION.
Links to other questions, e.g Q15.1.
Links to FTP and HTTP sites.
Links to Email addresses.
Links to newsgroups e.g. comp.ai.genetic
Cross references to book details, e.g. [ICGA85]
Bulleted lists.

Furthermore, when the FAQ was originally written, by Jörg Heitkötter, a lot of control codes for bold and italic were included. These looked very nice in the Postscript version, but those people who only ever read the plain text version didn't get to see the FAQ in its full glory. Now, though, the HTML version converts these codes into the appropriate HTML codes, for your enhanced viewing pleasure!

What's Not Included?

You wont find lots of fancy images in here. This project has concentrated on producing a good HTML representation of an existing "paper" document. The development effort on this project has gone into adding functionality to the guide, not flashy images, which mostly serve to slow down loading. The intention is that anyone who sees this version of the guide will immediately recognise it as another version of the existing Hitch Hiker's Guide to Evolutionary Computation.

However, there is still more work to be done. A number of things have yet to be converted for the HTML version. These include:

Links between software entries in Q20 and the corresponding detailed entry in Q20.1 or Q20.2.
More precise paragraph formatting.

These are projects for some other time ...

This project has been undertaken by David Beasley <david.beasley@iee.org>.

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