Greg Newby wrote:
I don't understand this limitation, so will rephrase what we're waiting for. It was among the first messages in this thread.
** What we want is an automatic means of generating canonical ** documents from an XML master.
The minimums are: XML --> HTML and XML --> text (yes, it's ok to go via HTML)
You already got that. There are 2 different ways to do this, both of them mature enough for beta testing. The roadblock is that a 100% correct and complete solution was requested by Jim before he considered starting to post TEI texts. Now, we don't have a toolchain for the whitewashers that is equivalent to the one already in place for TXT and HTML files. That's why I volunteered to act as "interim" whitewasher: to manually go thru the steps needed to post a TEI file and derivative formats, to understand how this toolchain needs to be built. I will only take a few texts (maybe a dozen) from a few selected sources Some of the objections raised by Jim will not go away real soon. He says he cannot skim thru a TEI file like thru a TXT or HTML file. But there are at present no readers that accept TEI as native file format. If we had to build that first (Jon Noring is trying), we will likely never start posting. 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. Now for another thing. Jim fears that we will end up with a lot of files marked up in differing TEI dialects. OTOH, the moratorium has actively encouraged this. People being eager to try TEI and there being no official place to post TEI files, everybody has posted the files they have marked up in a different place. I have been working on my dialect, Jeroen on his and DP is cooking up another one. There is no central "clearing house" where we can see the other guys work. I don't say it would be impossible for me to obtain a glimpse of the TEI texts the folks at DP are working on, it would just be much easier if I could get them from the archive. At this point we need to set a signal that the TEI era has started. We don't need more discussion about whether TEI is the right language, I think we are all agreed on that. pgxml.org is dead and ZML is good for laughs. What we need now is to compare notes, all who have been doing TEI and get to an agreement of which dialect to use. That can be best reached if we all post samples of our work and try to run the other guys markup thru our XSL etc. etc. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org