Jon Noring wrote:
I would think and hope that DP will convene a formalized working group of the various experts and enthusiasts here and elsewhere to hammer out the DP Markup Specification based on requirements gathering and analysis, which is the proper way to do this.
I think design-by-committee is the wrong way to go about this. Experimenting markup with more and more complicated books and refining the specs along the way seems to me far more promising. But that's the Cathedral vs. the Bazaar discussion again. To see a particularly disgusting example of design by committee just look at XSLT.
The DPMWG will have a more formalized and committed leadership structure, with weekly teleconference calls. From my standards working group experience, it's amazing how much stuff gets done during weekly teleconferences and the occasional face-to-face meeting (biannual or annual), while written listserv exchanges in a group like gutvol-* usually ends up going around and around in circles.
Teleconferencing will essentially shut out all non-us based people via the prohibitive costs or via the language barrier. Non native English speakers like me may have a better standing in a written discussion channel.
I would even ask someone like C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen to be an advisor to the working group
I don't know if the TEI people could advise us much. What we need is not advice about the use of TEI as markup language but about the use of TEI as master format for automatic rendition into a wide variety of output formats. There is the tei-presentation list for this sort of thing but traffic there has been very light. The only person who could really help is Sebastian Rahtz. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org