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

[Jack Park <jackpark@thinkalong.com>]

While looking at the construction of a literate programming system, I, too, 
discovered openebook, and also concluded that it is far too 
presentation-centric.  We really do need a semantic system, perhaps coupled 
with XSL for the presentation.  I hereby second Frank's motion to pursue 
such a thread.

Jack Park
At 11:21 PM 2/11/00 -0500, you wrote:
> > 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
> >
> >
> >