----- Original Message ----- From: Jon Noring <jon@noring.name>
<snipped a lot of good stuff> I just wanted to address the DP/PG TEI Working Subcommittee idea. Probably not going to happen. Things tend happen like this around DP: One or two people see something irritating they want to scratch badly enough to start working on it themselves. Then, they come up with a workable implementation that is put out as a "test" of some sort. It gets refined and used more and more until it becomes a defacto standard. (See our current proofing guidelines at DP for a prime example of this process.) In this case, TEI was talked about but no one wanted to "scratch the itch" enough to take it on as their baby. I'm finally irritated enough by multiple formats that I've decided to get something going. With Marcello's invaluable technical expertise, I'm trying to keep the ball rolling. It's slowed down by the fact that I am NOT a TEI/XML expert, but I am making some progress. I've already learned a ton in the last week ... enough to be impressed by the TEI spec and by Marcello's work on the transforms so far. My goal is to have a working XML->HTML and XML->TEXT conversion for 90% of the texts that go through DP sometime before Christmas. The caveat here is that I'm still learning and while it looks doable to me now, I may learn something tomorrow that makes me revise my estimate. So, for now, I guess I'm the "unofficial" working committee (well, Marcello, too, since I keep bugging the poor guy constantly and he's still nice enough to respond to my e-mails). Others have provided very helpful pointers and advice, too, but I'm hoping to push this past just talking about it and into actually having something that works at some level. (Right now, the XML -> HTML conversion is "almost" there ... the XML -> TEXT conversion needs more work.) Josh