[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] "Smart ASCII" -> XML for authoring?
The notion of "smart ASCII" as a way of creating structured documents whose conventions allow it to be easily transformed to XML hit me twice yesterday, once in the day job (a very significant media company uses this to achieve interoperability between diverse authoring systems) and once when reading http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tipt2dw.html? open&l=136,t=grx,p=mod : "For the most part, "smart ASCII" is what you have been writing for years if you use e-mail and the Usenet. ...Asterisks surround bold or heavily emphasized phrases; dashes surround italicized or lightly emphasized phrases; underscores introduce Book or Series Titles. ... They are all very quick to type. Anything that looks like a URL is turned into a link automatically. A fairly simple special format with curly braces and the ALT text before a colon is used to insert images, such as charts and graphs." There's a script included (a few hundred lines of well-commented Python) to do the conversion to XML. I'm of two minds on this ... on one hand it sounds like a return to the Bad Old Days and will require continuing human intervention to cleanup the inevitable not-so-smart ASCII before it can be converted to XML rather than one-time human intervention to teach markup skills to the authors. On the other, it leverages what humans do best -- deal with patterns, templates, informal conventions -- and lets computers do what they do best -- generate and parse formal syntaxes, putting XML further behind the scenes, perhaps where it belongs. I'd be interested in hearing others' reactions to this IBM DeveloperWorks article and about actual experiences in the field. My guess is that is makes a LOT of sense for simple documents (memos, weblogs, simple articles) and virtually no sense for serious technical documents where the whole point of SGML/XML is to catch the structural errors as early and automatically as possible even if this requires some pain on the part of the authors. But how big is the middle ground, and when does it pay to make authors switch over to XML? In other words, should XML stay in the background, or is it time for the end-users to add basic markup knowledge to their repertoire of skills?
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