- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

re: [gutvol-d] the issues with using stylesheets across many documents
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 23 Aug '05

23 Aug '05

marcello said: > No, there is not. marcello, _you_ might not have any large-scale stylesheet experience. but perhaps someone else here has. if not, then it will be a very bumpy ride over the next few years, as y'all learn. > We are all new into this. um, well, speak for yourself. i started using stylesheets back in 1987, with the first release of ventura publisher. and i figure i made the 428 common mistakes most people make, and learned to avoid 'em... > We want to get there and we will learn as we go. and again, i'm guessing that someone here has already been there, and back, and will guide you, if you let them. there are a lot of people on this listserve, willing to help... > Software development is an iterative business. and again, someone has already done that back-and-forth. > Many problems surface as you > start using the first implementation. stylesheets are well past their "first implementation". > With what you learn from the first implementation > you go back and do the second. And so on. stylesheets are well past their "second implementation". > Requiring all problems to be known > and solved in advance is the one sure fire thing > to never get started. Known as: "analysis paralysis". and ignoring the lessons of the past is one sure-fire way to repeat the pain... now, is anyone willing to step in and help out project gutenberg? please? thank you... -bowerbird

1 0

the issues with using stylesheets across many documents
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 23 Aug '05

23 Aug '05

i'd like to assure myself that there is experience here on the issues with using stylesheets across many documents. how would you sum up _the_major_question_, and answer it? what problems typically arise? what are some workarounds? when/how/why do workarounds cause their own problems? anyone who has worked extensively with stylesheets knows their magical power is typically matched by an ornery ability to mess things up too, and very badly. is that expertise here? please, someone, show me that it is, with a detailed treatment. (or else i will have to come in and give one, and you all know how insufferable my superior tone can be, right?). thank you. -bowerbird

2 1

Re: [gutvol-d] ANNOUNCEMENT: XML has hit the PG archives!
by Lee Passey 23 Aug '05

23 Aug '05

Joshua Hutchinson <joshua(a)hutchinson.net> wrote: > Thanks to some back and forth with David Widger, we have posted a text > to the PG archives that is basically the XML with its straight from > conversion txt, html and pdf files. > > http://www.gutenberg.org/1/6/5/2/16523 > > For those interested: This book (Kitab-i-Aqdas) is a religious book > from the Baha'i Faith. The text is freely available from the Baha'i > website with a usage license that allows us to post the text to our > archive as long as we don't make any content changes. I've basically > converted it from the Microsoft Word format they posted in to a PGTEI > based master and used that to create text in UTF-8, Latin-1 and 7-bit > ASCII, html and pdf. > > Regarding the XML. The XML file can be found in the 16523-x > subdirectory. These files are not designed to be read directly in a > web browser like IE or Firefox. They are plain text files and open > just fine in Notepad or vi or any other text editor of choice. For > those wishing to play with the XML, our online validator and > conversion tools can be found here: > > http://www.gutenberg.org/tei > > Besides wanting to celebrate the first XML posting ;) ... I'm also > looking for contructive criticism. What doesn't look right? What > problems do you see with the results? Congratulations on a worthwhile accomplishment. I would like to point out, however, that this is _not_ Gutenberg's first XML posting; I believe there are hundreds of XHTML files currently available. You probably intended to say that this is Gutenberg's first TEI-XML posting. I know that this seems like picking at some pretty minor nits, but there are some people who believe that there is actually a text markup language called XML. XML is actually a syntax for creating markup languages, and there are many markup language available which conform to the XML syntax, e.g. XHTML, TEI, and DocBook. For clarity's sake it is probably desirable to always refer to a specific XML vocabulary, except when discussing the XML syntax which applies to all XML vocabularies equally. Some specific, and very preliminary observations: As Mr. Noring is always quick to point out, XML files can be viewed natively in both Firefox and IE6 when accompanied by appropriate style sheets, so I attempted to open this file directly in both of these browsers. In IE6, I get the error "The system cannot locate the object specified. Error processing resource 'http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/DTD/pgtei-extensions.ent'. Apparently, your dtd, http://www.gutenberg.org/tei/marcello/0.3/dtd/pgtei.dtd, contains the line: <!ENTITY % TEI SYSTEM "http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/DTD/tei2.dtd"> %TEI; It looks like IE sees a full url for the TEI SYSTEM entity, so it assumes that <!ENTITY % TEI.extensions.ent SYSTEM "pgtei-extensions.ent" > refers to a file on the same system as "tei2.dtd." Of course, the TEI consortium doesn't maintain a file called "pgtei-extensions.ent", so IE fails catastrophically. Now I'm still having a hard time wrapping my head around dtd's, so I have no idea if IE's behavior is technically correct or not, but it would be nice if the dtd's could be reworked in such a way that this failure does not occur, perhaps by hosting the TEI dtd's at http://www.gutenberg.org/tei/marcello/0.3/dtd/, and referencing them there. Firefox does not have this problem, but Firefox also breaks when it encounters named entities, even when the entities are referenced in .ent files included from the dtd's, leading me to believe that Firefox avoids the problems associated with "roaming dtd's" by simply not parsing them in the first place. Numerical entities _are_ recognized, and rendered appropriately, as are named entities when the entity definition is contained in the XML file itself. I have no solution to this problem, except to suggest that named entities simply be avoided in favor of numeric entities, at least in the short term (I do note that the etext 16523-x.xml does not contain any named entities). One of my pet peeves is the use of the <p> (paragraph) tag as a generic block tag, rather than limiting its use to true paragraphs, and using the <div> tag for generic blocks of text. I am happy to say that the text is mostly correct in this regard. The byline <p>by Bahá’u’lláh</p> should be marked using the <byline> tag instead of <p>; there may be other similar problems I simply haven't encountered yet. It appears that the file is latin-1 encoded, despite the fact that the DTD claims that it is utf-8 encoded. This caused Firefox some grief as it tried to utf-8-decode some latin-1 accented vowels. I grabbed an arbitrary "tei.css" style sheet off the net, and added the line: <?xml-stylesheet href="tei.css" type="text/css"?> to the beginning of the file. Looking at it in both browsers (after I had copied enough .dtd's and .ent's to my local file system that IE could cope) the document looked quirky, but readable. When I deleted the .css file the document turned into a plain-text file, totally without styling, but nothing broke. I think every PGTEI document should probably start with the three lines: <?xml-stylesheet href="tei.css" type="text/css"?> <?xml-stylesheet href="pgtei.css" type="text/css"?> <?xml-stylesheet href="usertei.css" type="text/css"?> and one of the next tasks should be to develop CSS files for generic TEI files and PG TEI files (the "usertei.css" file should be reserved for sophisticated users who may want to override the standard styles). If this were done (and the dtd issues are resolved for IE), the production TEI files should be usable directly by a modern web browser without any kind of pre-processing. If you're interested, I'll start putting together a generic CSS file for TEI.

5 5

Re: [gutvol-d] ANNOUNCEMENT: XML has hit the PG archives!
by Joshua Hutchinson 23 Aug '05

23 Aug '05

----- Original Message ----- From: "Jon Noring" <jon(a)noring.name> > > Another issue of incompatibility, where CSS may break down, is that > the table model in TEI is different in some ways from the HTML table > model. Not sure if this can be fixed with CSS 'display'. Does PG-TEI > include support for TEI tables? (I would assume it does.) > Yes it does. See www.gutenberg.org/tei for a link to the documentation we have on PGTEI. > > PGTEI --> XHTML 1.1 (or XHTML 1.0 Strict) --> OEBPS 1.x Document(s) > > OEBPS 1.x document(s) + OEBPS Package --> OEBPS 1.x Publication > If you or anyone else would like to code something up, I'd be happy to test it out. I'm afraid my talents do not lie in that direction! ;) Josh

2 1

re: the great programmer
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 22 Aug '05

22 Aug '05

marcello said: > ROTFL: the great programmer > can't figure out how to > install a decent mail program. > Your words are soo big, > but your actual abilities are pretty small. yeah, i'm just one of the 30 million a.o.l. idiots slobbering on our keyboards... :+) -bowerbird

1 0

Re: [gutvol-d] About the XML debate
by Joshua Hutchinson 22 Aug '05

22 Aug '05

I played a little with the ReaderWorks converter for HTML to LIT. The biggest limitation is that the LIT format supports a nice Table of Contents feature which a basic HTML to LIT conversion doesn't support. The LIT specs are supposedly free (and under a Free License) but I haven't checked into it any further than that. I supposed after TXT, HTML and PDF are working in the PG mainstream, I'll move on to other formats like the Palm and Reader formats. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Marcello Perathoner" <marcello(a)perathoner.de> > > Joshua Hutchinson wrote: > > > Marcello had a Palm format working at one point, if I remember correctly. > > I dropped it because pluckering the html file gives you a better experience at > a smaller file size. > > The same conversion should be possible for Pocket-PC formats, but I'm not > going to buy one just to test this. > > > -- Marcello Perathoner > webmaster(a)gutenberg.org > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d

6 13

re: [gutvol-d] ANNOUNCEMENT: XML has hit the PG archives!
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Aug '05

21 Aug '05

joshua said: > ANNOUNCEMENT: XML has hit the PG archives! that's great! one down, 16000+ left to convert... congratulations! -bowerbird

2 1

re: [gutvol-d] About the XML debate
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Aug '05

21 Aug '05

brad said: > I don't understand why a person who hates XML/HTML > so much sends HTML formated mail to the list. it's been forced upon me, as i can't turn it off. > You should really practice what you preach :) yes, i should. instead the powers-that-be are forcing things on me, which is what y'all preach. ;+) meanwhile, this thread has hit 20+ posts over the weekend, which is very rude, since many people do not check their e-mailboxes on the weekend, so i'll opt out until tomorrow. -bowerbird

3 2

re: narrow-minded free software bigot bastard, and proud of it
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Aug '05

21 Aug '05

marcello said: > Besides, I'm a narrow-minded free software bigot bastard > and proud of it. great. i like people who stand up for what they believe in. now i have a question. who runs project gutenberg, anyway? -bowerbird

1 0

re: [gutvol-d] About the XML debate
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Aug '05

21 Aug '05

jon noring said something or other. however, since jon is still moderating michael hart over on jon's listserve, i won't be responding to him. -bowerbird

2 1