[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Clarification (was Re: Gutenberg Project <longish>)
"Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...> writes: > At 10:32 PM 3/9/00 +0000, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > >lets not pretend that XML is a language for humans, please... > > Sorry Sebastian, it may not fit your vision of the computing universe, but > the fact that mere mortals can work with XML in a text editor is one of its > greatest selling points, in my experience. Wow, this has sure spun out of control from my original suggestion. Frank had mentioned that Gutenberg was considering defining and documenting its own vocabulary, and he listed requirements that were a very close match to TEI. I suggested that with TEI at one extreme and XHTML at the other (not to mention the Open eBook stuff, which I didn't mention) the world didn't need Yet Another XML Vocabulary for literary texts, and that all the effort of defining and documenting might be wasted. I'll take the blame for simply assuming that people would understand that that does *not* mean that people have to mark up texts in TEI or TEI-lite or XHTML by hand, much less use or understand the whole of TEI or XHTML. As Liam suggested, it makes the most sense to define an extremely simple XML vocabulary for typical markup cases, and then to convert to, say, a TEI subset (using XSLT or something else) before putting it on the Web. In the rare cases where the text needs hairier markup from the start (i.e. parallel translations), you'll need a volunteer who understands TEI, but those cases are rare enough. In other words, someone doing the initial markup on Heart of Darkness should use a really simple format like this: <!DOCTYPE dumbbook SYSTEM "dumbbook.dtd"> <dumbbook> <front> <title>Heart of Darkness</title> <author>Joseph Conrad</author> <transcription>David Megginson</transcription> <source>FooBar edition, 1912</source> </front> <body> <chapter> <title>I</title> <p>The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.</p> <p>The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished spirits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.</p> ... </chapter> ... </body> </dumbbook> It's no big deal for one of us to write an XSLT or even Perl script to change that to TEI or XHTML for online publication. Why spend the (enormous amount of) time to define, document, and maintain a new exchange vocabulary? Users are alreay complaining that there are too many XML vocabularies that do the same thing, and that XML isn't really bringing them any interoperability. All the best, David -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.com/ *************************************************************************** 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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