- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

re: [gutvol-d] About the XML debate
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 20 Aug '05

20 Aug '05

david said: > So what exactly is your point? my point, exactly, is that a lot of people here tout x.m.l. as the solution, but no one seems to want to pay the cost of actually doing the markup. why is that? as to all the verbiage about what constitutes whether a file is "human readable" or not, if we ask some humans, the answer is clear. > Since < and > are within the 0-127 character limit, > XML is actually ascii text. That means it is "plain text". um, no. an x.m.l. file is not "plain text". ask a human. > How does storing a textual work in XML > in any way increase its price? applying the markup requires expensive expertise. > In fact, it should dramatically decrease the "price", > because it requires less handling to convert to > any of a dozen or more formats. or so the hype goes. but where is the pudding? meanwhile, over at blackmask, daniel has been converting the entire project gutenberg library into a half-dozen formats for several years now, based on the plain-text versions, with zero x.m.l. > And as much as I hate to bring it up, > how many times have you openly exclaimed that > you were leaving for good, and failed to do so? you'll be dealing with me for a long time, david... provide some pudding. don't just talk about it. there are 17,000 e-texts waiting to be marked up. -bowerbird

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About the XML debate
by Brent Gueth 20 Aug '05

20 Aug '05

Going through the archives in my mail box the last few days I wanted to add my .02 as someone who is not as close to the project as any of you. I think that any XML work (if Gutenberg goes that way) needs to be done in addition to, not in replacement of plaintest. I don't care if XML becomes as common as plaintext and everyone uses it, you can run into a problem in 20 years where XML falls out of favor and there won't be software to render it properly. This will lead poor fools having to redo all the documents all over again. This is not a good thing. Picking plaintext is genious in the sense, that unless basic ASCII changes (not likely compared to XML losing favor) plaintext will always be able to be read. This allows it also to be read on older machines. Maybe some of you don't care that the guy with commodore 64 can read plaintext but can't read XML because he is only one person on the planet. But when you see all the other 1 person implementations add together it becomes a decent percentage. My thoughts on a software to do the annotations would be to have a read that could overlay annotations on the screen but maintain the base document in plaintext or maintain a seperate annotated edition. The problem also we come into when we discuss modern annotations is who do we decide who is qualfied to release (write up) the annotations for a certain book. I may not agree with the annotationist that Bob likes, and Sue will hate the choices bob and I will make. The best solution I could honestly see to keep a degree of sanity is to Wiki each book you wanted to annotate. But I'll go back to reading now the archives now, I just though plaintext still needed a champion before the whole world went completely XML crazy. Remember - plaintext was supposed to be replaced by Postscript plaintext was supposed to be replaced by word perfect plaintext was supposed ot be replaced by word plaintext was supposed to be replaced by PDF plantext was supposed to be replaced by HTML plaintext is supposed ot be replaced by XML? Not bloody likely

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How to submit a new file to a posted ebook?
by Joshua Hutchinson 19 Aug '05

19 Aug '05

If I've finished producing a version of a posted text (such as HTML or PDF) and I want to get that submitted and posted ... how would I go about that/who should I bug with my e-mail? I'm thinking it would either me one of the white-washers or the errata e-mail (which ends up in Jim's lap anyway), but I don't want to bother those folks who are overworked already, unless I know I'm supposed to be bothering them. :) Josh

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re: SOPHIE (replacement for tk3 and XML-based) Re: [gutvol-d] Annotations for students
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 18 Aug '05

18 Aug '05

jon said: > Well, I have written over 100,000 lines of code (Fortran) > over the years. I've also written some scripts. > I've edited and compiled some C code. > I've written a bunch of GWBasic programs. > And I have a couple associates in the XML world > who are programming wizards and who I often > consult with regarding what can and can't be done. great! then i'm really looking forward to your program, jon... like i always say, the proof is in the pudding. deliver pudding. > Btw, the tk3 example you gave in the other email > you just sent (and I just read), the replacement for it, > SOPHIE, will be *XML-based*. The developer of tk3, > Bob Stein, is the major player of SOPHIE. He's been > around for years and years -- his partner is very experienced. i brought up tk3 because david rothman mentioned it in his blog, so i took a fresh look at it. and since the topic was annotations, and tk3 is one of the programs with good annotation capabilities, it seemed appropriate. now, as you'll note in comments i made over on david's blog, i know tk3 -- and bob stein -- very well. (not personally, but i've followed his work since voyager days.) i've talked to bob, and steve riggins (and steve's wife) as well. i've even dropped some of my e-book programs on them, and they've been impressed. tell 'em to watch out for me! :+) but even after having visited the website you listed, i am puzzled. "sophie" is actually the name of an e-book viewer-app written by _richard_gaskin_, of fourth-world, another l.a.-based programmer. see it at: http://www.fourthworld.com/products/sophie/index.html so this makes me wonder if gaskin and stein are now teaming up? that would be sweet. i've been looking for a worthy competitor in the e-book viewer-program realm, and openreader has been a huge vapor bust so far, so a stein/gaskin product might be the one! but i don't see anything on either website to indicate a merger?... (after reading the .pdf, i see now that there's probably no merger. riggins works in small-talk, while gaskin uses run-time revolution. so it appears that this is just an unfortunate program-name crash, all revolving around programmers who've been on the left coast.) > Gee, I wonder why they will now change gears > and embrace XML? They are *experienced* developers > with a lot of knowledge of the tk3 product (over 15 years), > and *they* are switching to XML. well, wonder no more, jon, because i can tell you why. they're going for some hefty venture-capital bucks, and x.m.l. is the trend-word of the decade. if i was looking for an investor sugar-daddy, i'd be spouting x.m.l. too! > You better hurry and convince Bob Stein he needs to > get rid of XML and embrace plain text! again, you think i have something against x.m.l. i don't. if x.m.l. gave me useful tools, and hid all the complicated file-formatting under the hood, i'd be happy to embrace it. what i _do_ have something against is _vaporware_. and that's _especially_ true in regard to electronic-books, which have stagnated through cycle after cycle of _hype_ because nobody -- except for adobe -- has made it easy to _author_ electronic-books that work well on all platforms. read the "sophie" website you listed, and their .pdf, and you will find that they both say the very exact same thing: we need easy authoring-tools to make a revolution happen. but instead of delivering honest-to-goodness, simple-to-use authoring-tools, we've wasted the time fiddling with formats! and when someone comes and asks a "how do i do this?" question, we snow them with a bogus vaporware answer. and then we wonder why nothing ever gets accomplished. > You better hurry and convince Bob Stein he needs to > get rid of XML and embrace plain text! Hurry, > before it is too late! Your programming experience > should convince them of the folly of their ways. nah. i'll let bob burn through that investor cash instead; he's already run tk3 through a couple rounds of funding. (and got another quarter-of-a-million from u.s.c. recently. man, i wonder what p.g. could do with a cool $250,000!) yep, i _like_ to see the venture capitalists fall on their ass chasing the trend-word of the decade, i really do... :+) -bowerbird

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re: thad weighs in
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 18 Aug '05

18 Aug '05

thad said: > What I'm thinking about at the moment is just: cool. thanks for weighing in again. :+) one thing i'd suggest to you is to take a look at some of the .html versions prepared by distributed proofreaders where they have used side-notes. it's pretty impressive, considering they are operating without any javascript... (but yeah, your comment about the difficulty of getting well-formatted pages when printing from .html is well-taken...) -bowerbird

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Re: gutvol-d Digest, Vol 13, Issue 10
by Thad Curtz 18 Aug '05

18 Aug '05

It's true - I don't have terribly grand aspirations for now (and I have done a good deal of amateur programming in a variety of languages, so a certain amount of technical overhead probably would be OK.) What I'm thinking about at the moment is just: 1. Some basic text formatting including superscripts for footnotes and italics. 2. Line numbers on the side every five lines for poems. 3. Glosses on difficult words - either as footnotes on the side, or as mouseover popups (with overlib, I suppose), or at the bottom of each page. 4. Longer explanatory notes. I think the longer notes need to be at the bottoms of the pages when they're printed, and it might be nice to have the dictionary glosses there too. (There's really not that much space on the side of the page for them...) And I'd like to do it in some way that's as standard as possible, as fast as possible, as simple for students to access as possible, and that makes it as easy as possible for other people who might want to do more to build on what I've done rather than starting over from scratch. (Eventually I assume people will want to be formatting this stuff for all sorts of digital reading platforms and all sorts of page sizes with cheap automated binding at home or at Kinkos or in college printshops.) The problems about getting it to print as decently formatted pages with footnotes at the bottom on a variety of printers are one big reason I'd rather not do it in straight HTML. The problems about people being able to add to it (and file size issues) are reasons I'd rather not do it with PDFs. But I've got now several leads for other tools and tactics to take a look at from your discussion. (As well as some ideas I hadn't thought of about why Gutenberg isn't already doing it...) I'll keep you posted if I get anything done. Thanks, Thad

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re: [gutvol-d] Annotations for students
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 18 Aug '05

18 Aug '05

tony said: > Greg, Jim and Andrew all seem to agree that such notes > should not be included in PG. This is too bad since > I would like to see such annotating. i would think it would be too difficult to decide _who_ would get to provide the notes for a particular e-text... it's easy enough for people to put their annotations on their website for download by anyone who wants. i think that's the reasonable course of action to take. *** jon said: > But will it work for *him*? i dunno. thad will have to tell me. :+) > Will it meet the requirements he sees > that such a system must fulfill? i'd think so, since i've done a lot of thinking and searching and researching on what the realm of requirements are. but who knows? maybe thad has an idea for a better mousetrap. tell me, what do _you_ think "the requirements" are? > That's the purpose of this discussion > -- to assess the requirements for any system > enabling external annotations of digital publications. not really. i got the impression that thad just wants something that works; he wasn't trying to start a philosophical discussion about the realm of annotation. he just wants to juxtapose his commentary next to the text to which it refers, i'd think. (thad, don't let this melee scare you off, man; step right in and tell us what you really think!) ;+) > This list of requirements is independent of > solution type, but will certainly be useful in > evaluating how one would implement the application > (whether plain text or XML-based.) again, i don't think this is all that complicated. if you've examined all the types of annotation needed, and seen how various e-book programs have implemented solutions, it is straightforward. > Btw, since DP is providing the lion's share of > the PG texts, to master them in XML (TEI and XHTML), > and plans to redo many of the early PG texts, > the issue that PG's corpus is now mostly plain text > becomes less compelling. yeah, well, you'll let me know when that markup is complete, won't you please? because i'm not holding my breath on it... -bowerbird p.s. i'm still doing some exploring about "sophie", but i'll be getting back to you on that very soon...

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Annotations for students
by Thad Curtz 18 Aug '05

18 Aug '05

Hi. I'm a college lit teacher and have been thinking about doing footnotes and annotations of the sort most editions for college students supply for some PG classics, so my students could have the usual kinds of help reading them, and print them out, mark them up, bring them to class for discussion, etc. (I think the lack of notes. not the quality of the texts themselves, is currently the main barrier to more widespread use of PG texts in classes.) If I did this, I'd want to make the annotations available free for anybody else who wanted to use them for teaching (or just to read). Some form of structured markup that allowed people to reformat and print to different sizes and devices in the future would be nice, rather than pdfs... I've looked at the archive, and haven't found any discussion of this topic; any suggestions or advice about such a project (or where to look next) would be appreciated. Thanks, Thad

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re: [gutvol-d] Annotations for students
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 18 Aug '05

18 Aug '05

scott said: > I hate to leave issues hanging, > but in your case I make an exception. no problem, scott. i'll have an annotation app out soon, so thad won't be left hanging for long. *** jon said: > You have not stated *why* you believe your plain text solution > is superior to XML for this particular application. sorry, i thought i've said that too many times to repeat again. a plain-text solution is superior to x.m.l. because it frees people from the hassle of doing markup. fewer costs, equivalent benefits. fairly straightforward... > You've only dissed the XML approach w/o going into detail > of how your plain text approach will sufficiently solve > the external annotation of digital publications and meet > all the important requirements as we understand them now. first of all, i haven't "dissed" the x.m.l. approach. if somebody can present me an x.m.l. solution that works, and is perfectly transparent to users, i'll be happy as a clam. what i have pointed out, respectfully, is that acronyms are not solutions. the feeling here seems to be that "x.m.l. can do that" is an answer. it's not. if x.m.l. can truly do something, give people a straightforward answer about _how_ to do it... i know people who do tech support for software companies. they are constantly having to deal with the expectations that were falsely raised by the marketing department that says "oh sure, our software can do that" simply to close the sale. then, when the customer (rightfully) expects the software to "do that", they are in for the surprise of their life, because -- although the software _can_ do that -- it usually requires a very expensive person (or even a whole crew) to work it. you're doing the same kind of bait-and-switch to people here. everyone gets the _impression_ that x.m.l. is all-powerful, but x.m.l. actually never gets around to doing anything at all! i hope thad, the original poster, will correct me if i'm wrong, but i don't believe he came here asking about what kind of core methodology he could use that would "eventually" let him "write some scripts" or "build an application" to do annotations. he wants to do annotations now, and wants a way to do them that doesn't involve a lot of unnecessary work to implement. the specific task that he has in mind is writing the annotations, not creating an annotation system. believe me, if x.m.l. delivered even _one-fifth_ of its promises, i'd be one of its biggest supporters. but so far it's 95% vapor. and let us not forget that, in order to start milking benefits, _first_ we have to mark up the entire library, and i must again remind people that little progress is happening on that front... > So far, all you've implied is "Trust me, *I'm* building a tool" wrong. my saying is "the proof is in the pudding". i'm not asking anybody to trust anybody. be skeptical! when my annotation program is ready, i will let you know. and i "trust" that when your system is ready, you'll tell me. and i "trust" the lurkers will notice who finishes first, and finishes best, and which system is more robust and powerful and cost-efficient and end-user friendly and all that good stuff. > You are being disingenous by implying "they" > (the XML experts) haven't done it because it can't be done. wrong. it _can_ be done in x.m.l. the degree of difficulty is higher than with plain-text. but it's _eminently_ doable. nothing is that difficult in this arena. this ain't putting a man on the moon. it's basically a note-taking application. what i _am_ curious about, though, is why it hasn't been done already? you'd think that with the huge number of people running around saying "x.m.l. is the solution" that _somebody_ would've put a bell on this cat by now. perhaps that degree of difficulty is higher than we think. > The people who authored XML included > a large number of *experienced* software > developers who would eat your lunch. when they finally write an annotation app, show me their program! if it works well, i'll buy 'em beer to go along with my lunch, and take 'em to the strip club that evening... -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] Annotations for students
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 18 Aug '05

18 Aug '05

jon said: > Most of the time one doesn't have to > author an actual implementation > to determine whether it will be hard or not. i program, jon. i'm not the world's greatest programmer, but there aren't that many things that are hard to program, even for me. you just have to be willing to break the job down into small enough pieces. oh yeah, it also helps to have users who don't care how big and/or slow your application might be... but until you've actually programmed your application, you don't really know what kind of obstacles lie hidden. heck, sometimes you don't find out until end-users tell you. > Most experienced and even inexperienced programmers > instinctively know the difficulty of most proposed applications. most inexperienced programmers can't count on their "instincts". (and someone like you -- a nonprogrammer -- certainly can't.) and experienced programmers know that some projects that look easy on the outside have a lot of those hidden obstacles. but one thing i can tell you for sure, as a programmer, is that if you let a nonprogrammer tell you what you should be doing, you're in for a very rough time, unless you're paid by the hour, and hard-up for the cash. (it also helps if you are a masochist.) another thing i can tell you for sure, as a programmer, is that the fact that a format is "open and universal" doesn't mean diddly-squat in terms of whether it'll be easy to program for it. > Bowerbird's system is clearly a RPGG > since I know it will NOT do everything > that has been discussed for digital texts. oh really? you seem to have some kind of super-e.s.p. when it comes to knowing about my stuff, some of which i haven't even programmed, which could provide _useful_info_ to me... heck, i can get a critique of my software _before_i_even_write_it_! that's awesome. so jon, tell me what it won't do... -bowerbird

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