xml-dev - Re: Gutenberg Project <longish>

[Jon Noring <noring@netcom.com>]

THOMAS PASSIN <tpassin@idsonline.com> wrote:

>After reading a lot of the postings in this thread, no one except the GP
>itself seem to be looking at the key issue namely, ***who will be creating
>the markup, and how can they do  a lot of it?***.  As far as I can see, it
>is likely to be volunteers who don't know much or care about markup and
>DTDs.  I imagine that they will want to:

In the e-book publishing DTD I envision (my thoughts posted under a different
thread), this aspect is a very important consideration in my book.


>1) Get on with the job with a minimum of things to learn up front and
>remember,
>2) Be able to know how to write their markup by looking at a few samples,
>3) Have the markup make sense at first or second glance,
>4) Minimize their typing,
>5) Easily see the results of their work, probably as they go along.
>6) Know that mistakes they make will not cause disasters.
>7) Use some helpful software as long as it is simple, easy to understand,
>and faster to use than plain typing.
>
>Any document design you come up with needs to meet these points ***first***
>because otherwise you won't get much markup produced nor many people to do
>it.  It looks like the GP people have already found this out.

In general, I agree with this.


>As to configurable DTDs for widespread interchange, this looks like a great
>place for keeping everything as close as possible to a single standard
>version, or at least a ***very*** few variations.  This would support
>non-paid volunteers, and public-domain software development, as well as the
>development and interchangable use of readers...
>
>I don't know much about TEI, but the only way it could work would be 1) you
>can really simpify it, and 2) you can rename elements to be evocative than
><div type="...">.  Preferably you want the element name to do the work, not
>an attribute (attributes like "type" go against points 1 and 4).  TEI people
>can speak to this, I don't know enough.

My other post earlier today outlined the two basic approaches to higher-
level structuring:  use <div type="...">, or create elements for all the
oft-used divisions (e.g., <titlepage>, <chapter>, <section>, <preface>,
<glossary>, etc.)  It is not a trivial issue.

Jon Noring
Yomu


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