On Wed, Oct 20, 2004 at 02:14:31PM -0700, Jonathan Ingram wrote:
--- Jim Tinsley <jtinsley@pobox.com> wrote:
Correct spelling is necessary but not sufficient. I don't know about other people, but I most commonly find errors by skimming the text. I can't do that with XML.
As my post earlier on today indicates, this isn't true.
If I may nit-pick, I think it more correct to say that it isn't _always_ true. That is, it is not true when there exists a CSS that works with the XML. Jeroen provided XML like this, which I thought was very good indeed. For any of you who haven't seen it, please point your browsers to http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/1/3/3/11335/11335-x/11335-x.xml which is an absolute pleasure to read. (Well, if you're a geek, that is, and if you ain't, whatcha doin. here?? :-) I said before, and I say again, that where such an XML is provided, HTML is probably redundant. ("Probably" because a significant use of HTML is as input to PDA readers like, say, Mobipocket, and I'm not sure if they would swallow this XML without requiring a Heimlich.) I know of no CSS for Marcello's PGTEI. Perhaps one could be crafted for it.
Assume that PG starts accepting some TEI-related schema. All you need is a relatively simple CSS stylesheet, and you can open the XML and view it perfectly directly.
See http://faculty.washington.edu/dillon/xml/ for some examples where you can view styled (XML-conformant) TEI directly in your browser, with no intermediate transformations required.
It does still leave the plain-text question hanging, but I do think that XML+CSS is a Good Thing, even if the XML is also destined to go through XSLT as well. jim