Re: [xml-dev] Why is text marked up ?

[Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org>]

On Thu, 2012-01-19 at 08:48 -0500, David Lee wrote:
[...]
> "Why is text marked up" ? 

Mark-up in retail increases the selling price.
Mark-up in texts increases the value.

"why not just write the text better" - a lot of our Western manuscript
tradition came out of an idea that there was an Original Text that was
Divinely Inspired by the Goddesses, and that could not be improved upon
by mortals; the task of the humans was to understand these sacred texts,
so that a commentary had to distinguish clearly the original and the
expansion.

Having said that, some of the necessary apparatus to do that is very
modern; there are no quotation marks in the 1611 King James Bible, and
the start and end of reported text is often unclear. Bibles sometimes
print the "sayings of Jesus" in red, but they don't necessarily all
print the _same_ text in red. This is because the concept of the "q"
element was not available at the time ;-)

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/