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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Gutenberg Project <longish>
 Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > > Ann Navarro writes: > > > The project shouldn't require a Masters degree in DTD authoring, nor years > > of expertise in SGML or other markup technologies. It *should* be very easy > > to do. I found TEI Lite to be very usable, much more so than DOCBOOK, which I found to be unusable (too many tags, names from Mars, too little documentation) at that stage. I know someone with years of SGML experience but who has a impairment that makes it difficult to remember complex names: that person found TEI very straightforward. I had used TEI for a large dictionary project several years ago, but that was just taking documents and using them. It was great; probably the easiest DTD I have used in the last 12 years. Last year I did a trial run of putting some Chinese poetry, Yuefu Shiji (Wefu Shrzi), into TEI Lite. (Academia Sinica has a very large text database of ancient Chinese text; the excercise was to prove that we could quickly generate/convert the database into XML and TEI when we needed to). I found the TEI lite documentation to be pretty clear, and TEI Lite was vey nice and terse to use. The example can be seen under http://www.ascc.net/xml/en/utf-8/i18n-index.html (you will need IE5) click the "Yuefu Shiji" link. It is hard for me to think of how to make a simpler, but useful, DTD that TEI. Where TEI falls down for casual use is that it does require a good deal of metadata: header information for saying who transcribed it and cpyright and so on. But a slacker version can easily be made, or authors can be just given the body elements and whoever puts it into a repository can add the headers at registration-time. But for actually marking up text, TEI is very fast. I would have thought that the last thing that people need is a new DTD for text. People almost inevitably create a DTD that looks like the things they are familiar with, in any case. HTML's core is based on the AAP/ISO DTDs around in the late 80s. TEI seems to have been a more thoughtful, systematic and innovative initiative. I would be very interested in knowing why TEI Lite was rejected. A project which says "we need to create a standard convention for literature markup" (if that is what Project Gutenberg does) has to justify why it rejects the currently existing one, which has been proven useful for non-markup people to use for many years. Rick Jelliffe *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ *************************************************************************** 
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