xml-dev - Use TEI (was Re: Gutenberg Project <longish>)

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

"Frank Boumphrey" <bckman@ix.netcom.com> writes:

> We are now ready to start developing a set of formal DTD's for Gutenberg and
> other e-texts.

I don't think we need yet another vocabulary for literary texts.

I would highly recommend either (a) starting with TEI or TEI-lite and
removing stuff, or (b) starting with XHTML and adding stuff.  The Text
Encoding Initiativen, in particular, has spent a lot of time working
out the kinds of problems you'll be facing (including encoding drama
and verse of all descriptions), and several e-text archives, including
the Oxford Text Archive, already use TEI.  Alternatively, XHTML is
well known, and you could add markup from a Gutenberg namespace (or
even from a TEI Namespace).

DocBook is not really suitable for working with literature, though it
is (obviously) fantastic for technical documentation.

> The aim is to develop DTD's be suitable for:
>       Books
>       Poetry
>       Plays
>       Saga's
>       Diaries
>       Compendiums
>       Letters
>       Mixed content
>       *Atlases
>       *Encyclopedias
>       Dictionaries
>       Historic Documents
>       *Scientific Documents
>       *Parallel Translations
>       Other
> 
>       *These may be too ambitious for our initial DTD's,
>        but we should at least have a look at them.

The TEI even has support for parallel translations (really!).


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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