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

["Frank Boumphrey" <bckman@ix.netcom.com>]

> 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

We have an open mind about eBook. Indeed we have an open mind about all
DTD's. We have people marking up documents against Docbook, TEI and XHTML.If
any one wants to use eBook to mark up books thats fine by us, all we ask is
that the DTD used is freely available..

My own reservations about eBook are that it appears to mix css with XHTML
for a styled markup, and I feel that markup of historic documents should be
entirely semantic plus structure.

So if that is what the marker wants to do I would prefer XHTML plus a style
sheet, but that is purely a personal opinion, officially the marker can use
eBook.

The only absolute rule we have is that the markup must validate against a
dtd in the public domain.

In fact 90% of the books marked up so far have used one of our own DTD's,
which are designed to be both descriptive and easy to use. We want to
develop an academically sound version of these DTD's, and this is where we
hope members of this list will help us!

Frank
----- Original Message -----
From: Dave Carlson <dcarlson@ontogenics.com>
To: <xml-dev@xml.org>
Sent: Friday, February 11, 2000 12:01 PM
Subject: Re: (Pre)Announce: Gutenberg at HWG


> 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
>
>
>