Jon Ingram wrote:
Joshua Hutchinson wrote:
... For instance, I'm working on TEI, which I think is of vital importance to the future of PG (some may disagree). Discussions of TEI lead naturally into discussions of Unicode, graphic image formats, CSS, and other markup formats.
There are quite a few of us who would find it interesting to talk about these topics on gutvol-d if we knew that it wouldn't descend into pointless mudslinging within a day.
Two issues brought up in the above comments: 1) PGTEI -- I agree with Josh about the vital importance of PGTEI to the future of PG, DP, and other similar structured digital text projects. As far as I am concerned, this is the core technology for the future of public domain text digitization. From my fairly coarse (not detailed) look at the PGTEI 0.3, I am quite impressed -- and excited -- with how it is progressing. Btw Josh, has any "formal" working group been put together to continue with PGTEI development? Or is it mostly Marcello and you? Is there a dedicated PGTEI mailing list or forum anywhere? 2) Where can we discuss topics of a future-technical-development nature, of which PGTEI is one of them? As I noted in a prior reply (a sort of "hindsight is 20-20" message), I think that discussion of such fairly technical and futuristic topics should NOT be done on gutvol-d, which I think needs to be reserved for "talking shop" and "general help" topics by PG's volunteers -- to discuss the "here and now" of PG's activities. I've been perusing (catching up on) the various forums at DP's site and it does not appear there's a forum which would be a good match for PGTEI and other future-tech-development topics. There is the DP forum "Future Features", but this appears dedicated primarily to suggesting and discussing new features of the DP system, so it has a more general, and more proofing-level focus. Topics such as PGTEI are more "under-the-hood" and fundamental in nature. So, assuming enough others agree with my assessment, where should the future-tech-development group/forum be placed (at lists.pglaf.org or as a DP forum), and what to call it? ***** Now to discuss a somewhat related point, and one I probably need to post to the appropriate DP forum since it is about the DP forums. But I'll mention it here as well since it is germane to any discussion of where to host a proposed group/forum. DP's forum system has a lot of good features, but it also has problems that I think inhibit participation by some people (including yours truly). Because many of us have to monitor a large number of groups/ forums/blogs all over the Internet, we prefer to have all new updates centralized and sent to us. Mailing lists are excellent in that any new messages are sent to us via email, which we process in one place in our email client, and which we can save offline in the format of our choice (e.g., I subscribe to 50+ mailing lists/groups, and I don't have to visit 50 different sites with 50 different interfaces to look for any updates.) Also, RSS syndication has become the rage for the same reason -- it is a very convenient way for end-users to be keep updated on new community content (such as blogs and DP-like community forums) without having to laboriously visit a large number of sites, each of which has their own way of organizing the community content. Thus, I hope that the DP forums will implement an RSS feed for each of its forums, for those of us who wish to keep updated on discussion. (It does appear possible to add RSS feeds to phpbb, at least from a cursory Google search I just did.) Jon Noring