xml-dev - Re: Gutenberg Project <longish>

["Sebastian Rahtz" <sebastian.rahtz@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>]

THOMAS PASSIN writes:
 > 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.  

um. why are these people doing it, if they dont know or care about
markup?

Me, I am old-fashioned. I'd rather have less, and quality, than loads
of texts knocked off by people working in a hurry. 

Actually, to be pragmatic, if I wanted 1000 books tagged consistently, 
I'd raise a bit of cash and have them done by highly-experienced
professional markup people in India.

 > 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,

they are going to write < and > and & with vi, these people? why don't they
use decent software in the first place, to conceal the nasty details
from them?

 > Ideally, the document design would also lend itself to more advanced
 > processing and conversion to other DTDs, but without following the numbered
 > points, there probably won't be much of a project anyway.

it does not seem to have prevented the creation of big, juicy, corpora 
of texts around the world. but then plainly I haven't read the
manifesto of gutenberg so I'd don't yet know what the point is.

 > 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). 

No real disagreement there. Nor very much work.

sebastian


***************************************************************************
This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers.
To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@xml.org&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev
List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/
***************************************************************************