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

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

> Since TEI Lite exists and is nicely documented, descriptive, and
> easy to use,

Wheras I would agree with most of what you say, 'easy to use' is not the
same as 'easy to learn'.

As some one who teches XML I can assure you that most students (and I'm not
talking about 'top of the class' students here) have a very hard time
learning and comprehending TEI. Unfortunately they do not find it intuitive.

To be readily adopted, a DTD must not only be easy to use, but also easy to
learn.

Contrast TEI with DocBook. Very few students have any difficult grasping the
concepts of DocBook, and find it easy to learn, although it is arguably more
difficult to use than TEI.

We have in fact introduced a bookplay.dtd for the situations you mention.

>I really can't see the point in spending time on a
> pale imitation instead of marking up more text

As I said before, we have nothing against TEI, but what we want is a 1000
documents marked up by the end of the year. This has to be done by volunteer
markers who are NOT XML experts. The fact that we are approaching 100
documents after 2 weeks, (and we are not even officially launched yet!)
marked up by volunteers who for the most part had no prior knowledge of XML
(just HTML), surely attests to the fact that there is some merit in a 'pale
imitation' that is easy to learn. :>)

(And you can always use XSL to convert to TEI if you want!)

Frank
----- Original Message -----
From: Walter Underwood <wunder@infoseek.com>
To: Frank Boumphrey <bckman@ix.netcom.com>; Dave Carlson
<dcarlson@ontogenics.com>; <xml-dev@xml.org>
Sent: Friday, February 18, 2000 7:58 PM
Subject: Re: (Pre)Announce: Gutenberg at HWG


> At 11:21 PM 2/11/00 -0500, Frank Boumphrey wrote:
>
> >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.
>
> [...]
> >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!
>
> Making an academically-sound DTD sure sounds like re-inventing
> TEI. You've already had to deal with verse, drama, and prose,
> except that TEI can mix them in the same document, and the
> Gutenberg at HWG DTDs can't (as you've already found out with
> Austen's "Love and Friendship" -- "Mansfield Park" also contains
> a play).
>
> Since TEI Lite exists and is nicely documented, descriptive, and
> easy to use, I really can't see the point in spending time on a
> pale imitation instead of marking up more text.
>
> wunder
> --
> Walter R. Underwood
> Senior Staff Engineer
> Infoseek Software
> GO Network, part of The Walt Disney Company
> wunder@infoseek.com
> http://software.infoseek.com/cce/ (my product)
> http://www.best.com/~wunder/
> 1-408-543-6946
>


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