On Fri, Oct 22, 2004 at 03:41:18PM +0200, Marcello Perathoner wrote:
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.
You didn't spoil my evening; just my participation in the thread. Having been so accused of evilly blocking the righteous progress of destiny because of my own hidden agenda and neuroses, it's hard to say constructive things. But I will say one more thing: if you read what I actually _said_ you will realize that almost everyone in this thread -- I would think -- could fairly easily create an XML and transform that meets the criteria I laid down. I could myself. So could you, or Jeroen, for sure. Josh and Jon, no problem. Anyone I've left out? Of course, none of us could do it for ALL texts. Not yet. But it doesn't need to be done for all texts; that was explicitly stated. If somebody wants to set up a standard that works for prose texts containing Title, Author, Chapter Heads, Paragraphs, Verses, Letter Headings and Signatures -- plus emphasis and languages, and try to work with that for a while, that would do. And which of us could NOT do that with just Xalan or Saxon, a simple XSLT, and quite a limited HTML-to-text converter? Of course, it wouldn't handle Alice. It wouldn't handle footnotes or tables. But for books that don't need these features it would work fine. There would be some details to work out in how the PG header works with them, and maybe the XML file itself should contain a description of how the HTML and text formats were derived, so that when we fixed the texts we would know how to remake them, or that some future reader could re-do the transform to their own tastes. And it would be good if, having got all that straight, we could set it up and document it as a standard so that other people wouldn't need to reinvent that wheel. It may be limited, but nobody said that we have to have a standard to cover all cases before tackling any. And then the people who are interested could go on to add more features, enlarging the standard. I'm surprised, after last year, that nobody has done this already. I'm surprised that you and Jeroen, who, in your different ways, had the best shot at XML didn't get together on it. Certainly, Greg has been asking you both about it. It _would_ be nice if we had a few people working together on it, so we get a shared understanding and consensus. Frankly, what is going to happen is that a few people at DP are going to forge a workable standard between them. Others will take it up, and then everyone will be doing it, so personally I'm just waiting for it to happen. jim