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I do not see any questions here about how to convert APA (or MLA, Chicago, Turabian, etc.) style into HTML (edit: styled with CSS) for online publication. Since HTML is perhaps the most accessible format for assistive technologies, I'm puzzled. As a professional who helped faculty create and teach online courses, I have experience with both website design and academia. One problem I've wrestled with has been APA run-in headings (level 4 primarily). I finally submitted the problem to Stack Overflow, and a CSS (cascading stylesheet) guru wrote a brilliant solution. My primary question is this: has anyone here encountered this problem? I'm also wondering, is the crossover between academia and online technology insufficient to know this is a problem? Is anyone here aware of issues in converting academic writing into accessible web-based material? Has anyone asked a webmaster to convert a paper into a web document and been told it was too difficult?

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No, have not encountered this problem: some publishers do aim for an online presentation of materials using regular web pages indeed, but then they have a freedom to pick a convenient citation style and whatnot. And if you are not a publisher, the "normal" way to disseminate the research results in academia is a publication list on a personal page and PDF files. So in a nutshell, there is not enough interest to the specific problem you are posing here indeed.

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  • Thanks! I recall a similar preference when working with faculty who were creating online courses. We encouraged faculty to convert as much material as possible into a true online format for accessibility, but in some courses that task was just too overwhelming.
    – iZann
    Commented Mar 2, 2022 at 15:34
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APA and other conventional scientific writing style guides are not well-suited for online publications.

The most elaborate way of displaying scholarly articles for online viewing is probably the one used by Research Ideas & Outcomes at Pensoft Publishers.

Here is an example of a recent paper, including a machine-readable XML-version of the paper.

Browsing through the XML, you will see how standardized it is and how many metadata it embeds -- here is a screenshot of one part of the <article-meta>-tag (containing information about the submission history, license, abstract, keywords, figure counts etc.):

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Such a metadata-rich formatting allows them to track statistics such as which Figures were viewed or downloaded most often - - again an example from the paper above:

enter image description here

EDIT: Just found out about DocMaps, this might be relevant here too: https://docmaps.knowledgefutures.org/

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  • Yes, XML seems to be a superior format if the publication uses XML. Are academic publications not published enough on HTML websites for this to be an issue? That would explain why HTML formatting and APA style don't seem to intersect.
    – iZann
    Commented Mar 1, 2022 at 17:19
  • I should have clarified in my comment above that while XML may be superior to HTML for screen readers, it does not style the appearance of content on a webpage. That has to be done with CSS — the same method used for HTML. So the issue of how to style run-in headings also applies to XML websites.
    – iZann
    Commented Mar 1, 2022 at 18:05

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