Jonathan Ingram wrote:
I'm not sure any use of XSLT can be called simple :). I've tried reading the spec, and I'm still recovering from the headaches. Fortunately there are easier ways to style (rather than transform) XML, using CSS. This is very well supported in all the Mozilla derivatives. While XSLT is something I'm going to have to look at eventually, for the moment I'm happy with CSS :).
CSS, while simpler, is less powerful and gives you only HTML.
If you want an example of what I'm playing with at the moment: recently I and another DP volunteer have been kicking around some ideas for semantic markup of drama.
What I've done with Faust is to reformat the text file in a sensible way and then use perl to automatically add TEI markup. I advise to use a perl script to add the basic markup and to refine the markup in a second markup-proofing step.
Those of you who know TEI can probably tell that 'my' markup is very similar to TEI markup (although a little more verbose). Much of it was arrived at independently, which makes me more confident that this styling approach is relatively sensible.
Why do people keep reinventing the wheel? TEI is perfectly good and designed explicitly for the task we have at hand. And it is a standard that is already in use in many e-libraries worldwide. I don't think we'll get PG to post texts in non-standard cooked-up formats. They are already making enough fuzz over perfectly valid TEI files. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org