Marxists.org Structure Comparison

Observed pattern on Marxists.org

  • Archive-first taxonomy under /archive/<author>/....
  • Author landing pages list major works and topic links.
  • Work pages are often chaptered with internal tables of contents.
  • Works frequently expose multiple source formats (html, pdf, epub or mirrors).
  • Bibliographic context (date, edition, translators/editors) appears near the top of work pages.

Current liberalismo.info pattern

  • Works are in single markdown files under library/*.md.
  • Author landing pages exist under authors/*.md.
  • Library index is a flat list with search integration.
  • Required metadata is already enforced by tests (title, author, year_first_published, original_language, source_url, tags).

Does current structure make sense?

Yes for MVP and editorial control. It is structurally close in spirit (author + work archive with source citations), but less granular than Marxists.org.

Main gaps vs Marxists.org

  • No chapter-level navigation generated automatically.
  • No explicit format/edition surfaced in index-level navigation.
  • No per-author sub-archive pathing model in URLs.

Practical next step

Use an import pipeline that:

  1. Converts source books (pdf/epub/txt/html) into library/<slug>.md with required metadata.
  2. Detects chapter headings and emits in-page contents.
  3. Preserves source format and extraction strategy in metadata and editorial note.

This keeps the current repo shape while moving UX closer to Marxists-style archive browsing.