Jim Tinsley wrote:
I feel Jim is raising artificial objections he knows we cannot overcome. If he doesn't want to learn TEI and he doesn't feel like proofing a TEI text in emacs, fine. But then, he should step aside and let other people do this work.
I find this very offensive.
I came home, and was reading happily enough through the threads until this.
I am sorry if I spoilt your evening and I apologize for that. I said "I feel" and that's the truth. Maybe it's just my fault.
these are the expectations I have had for XML as far back as I can remember, and they are expectations regularly assumed, if not met, by people who evangelize XML.
Some of your expectation cannot be met. Some would imply an enourmous expense of time on the developers part to save relatively little time on your part.
I "learned TEI" (not all of it, of course) with the hope of using it in PG, in late 2001/early 2002, and I marked up my first book in XML in February, 2002, which was long before I ever heard your name.
I have marked up 25 books, prose, lyrics and plays. And I transformed all of them successfully to HTML, TXT, PDF and PalmDoc. That was a year ago. I could have done more but I felt that it was better to go public with what I had, to get comments and suggestions from other people. I thought if PG posted some of those files I would get comments. Since then I have been waiting. I think I have done my part. My files are done better than many I see posted. Even if we had to fix them later, the philosophy of PG did at some point expressly allow the posting of preliminary files. I cannot see why this simple request should cause so much trouble and fear today. These are some of your expectations that you should reconsider:
I really no longer give any headroom at all to the approach "Post XML Now Because That Is The One True Way And We'll Figure Out How To Read It Later." If for no other reason, then because the most important part of the WW job is to check the texts before posting, and if we can't read it, we can't find the errors, and if we can't find the errors, we can't fix 'em.
You can read a TEI file in an editor. You can spell-check it. You can validate it. You can find the errors. The process is just a bit different from what you have now, and will always be until there crop up some native TEI readers.
That process must work for _all_ teixlite files, not just ones that are specially cooked, using constraints not specified within the chosen DTD. Here's where we hit the rocks today.
Impossible. There are things you cannot specify in a DTD but still must be followed to get a semantically correct file. (This holds for every XML application not just for PGTEI.) You always have to obey some extra rules besides validity. These are put down in the PGTEI guide.
The only things we must have -- both for our own internal practical purposes and for the use of future readers -- is that it should work reliably on _all_ texts that conform to the XML DTD chosen, be open source, and be cross-platform. A reader needs to be able to tweak the transform and re-run on her own desktop.
Same as above. The DTD is not strict enough (RelaxNG will be better, but it's still early). There will always be valid TEI files that do not transform to `correct' output files. I don't see why it is necessary for the conversion tools to run on everybodies desktop before we can start posting files. If the tools run on pglaf.org and gutenberg.org that is more than enough for a start. The tools can be fixed later. That won't make posted valid TEI files invalid. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org