xml-dev - Re: (Pre)Announce: Gutenberg at HWG

["Dave Carlson" <dcarlson@ontogenics.com>]

Frank,
I recently stumbled across the Open eBook XML initiative (see
http://www.openebook.org/ ).  I am interested if either of your
organizations have an opinion on OEB, particularly because I noticed it is
not mentioned in your announcement.

OEB requires use of a subset of XHTML for the body of the eBook (but allows
for extensions), and defines an XML package document standard for defining
all of the book's parts, plus specifying Dublin Core metadata.

-- Dave

----- Original Message -----
From: Frank Boumphrey <bckman@ix.netcom.com>
To: <xml-dev@xml.org>
Sent: Friday, February 11, 2000 2:09 AM
Subject: (Pre)Announce: Gutenberg at HWG




The HTML Writers Guild is a not-for-profit, 125,000 strong international
educational  organization of HTML authors.

Project Gutenberg is an organization founded by Michael Hart in 1971 to
record the worlds great literature as ASCII text. To date almost 10,000
volumes have been marked up.

'Gutenberg at HWG' is a joint initative of these organizations to convert
the ASCII texts to XML. This project has been in gestation for a few weeks
but is not yet officially launched. We are in the process of a 'proof of
concept' trial with a few of of our members. . The (unfinished) site can be
visited at www.hwg.org/opcenter/gutenberg. We have already marked up about
30 books, and have another 50 or so in the pipeline. See
www.hwg.org/opcenter/gutenberg/checkdoc.html.

We are operating two mailing lists which can be subscribed to at
www.hwg.org/lists
for the general discussion of markup (hwg-gutenberg@hwg.org) and for the
design of suitable DTD's for marking up historical documents
(hwg-gutenberg-dtds@hwg.org).

Currently we have in operation 3 'alpha' XML DTD's for Plays, Books and
Poetry. We also encourage the use of any other XML  DTD's such as XHTML and
Norms DocBook.dtd for XML. Murray Altheim has also contributed a great DTD!

We are pre-announcing to this list in the hope that members of the list will
take an active role in helping us develop suitable DTD's for this important
project, or may otherwise contribute their expertise.

We are also looking for individuals who would be interested in supervising
XML markup in languages other than English, and in non-roman character sets.
There are numerous documents in Crylic, Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Kanji,
Hebrew etc. that are asking to be transcribed and marked up. If any one
feels they can supervise or partake in such an effort we would love to hear
from you.

I hope that all interested parties will subscribe to our mailing lists. I
can also attest to the fact that marking up an ASCII document in XML is
great fun and relaxation! If any one would like to help in  this or any
other capacity, could they e-mail me at this address or at frank@hwg.org and
put 'xml-dev/gutenberg' in the header.

I look forward to hearing from you

Frank Boumphrey.
VP HTML Writers Guild
Director Gutenberg@HWG