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Date:Mon Sep 19 09:22:16 2003 
Subject:Re: help system - ideas wanted 
From:Roger . Evans 
Volume-ID:1030919.02 

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Chris Dollin wrote:

>x wrote:
>
>  
>
>>I would use marked up text, either xml or xhtml. Providing a filter to
>>remove the tags is straight-forward. Styling via a set of standard
>>cascading style sheets (CSS) would then give you a specific look and
>>feel.
>>    
>>
>
>I think this is a dreadful idea; those languages are *not* convenient
>to write. And XML isn't "marked up text", even though that's its
>historical origin - the pointy-bracket structure is fundamental to
>an XML document, rather than being mere decoration.
>  
>
Sorry Chris, I can't let this go. Clearly the view of someone not 
working in the text processing industry, to whom using XML purely for 
data markup is just an amusing curiosity. I don't deny its an issue 
though - there are two distinct ways of using XML which ultimately boil 
down to whether you allow element content to be free text *interspersed 
with* XML elements or not. Sounds pretty trivial but actually has quite 
a big impact on the kinds of things you want to do and what tools you 
should use to do it.

But I agree that the achilles heel of XML is that it's painful (though 
in principle possible) to edit XML by hand, but there remains, even 
after these several years of XML development, a dearth of decent 
customisable tools to make the job easy (there's a good number of 
generic tools, of course, but they don't really support the kind of 
ease-of-use hype that surrounds XML).

The tex/data markup issue is blurred by using 'standoff' markup, which 
might be worth at least thinking about in this context. The idea of 
standoff markup is that you represent text-style markup as a separate 
parallel data-style XML object, which contains pointers into the text 
document. Its nice because its not invasive, and ebcause you can have 
parallel multiple markups of a text that are not tree-structured with 
respect to one another (type 'standoff markup' into google for more info 
on it). So Steve could have one file which is plain text, and a parallel 
file that marks up hyperlinks, text attributes etc in it, for systems 
that want to exploit that. The downside is that your 'document' is 
potentially distributed across multilple files that can get out of sync...

Roger


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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1">
  <title></title>
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#ffffff">
<br>
<br>
Chris Dollin wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
 cite="mid200309190820.h8J8KDMV089965@soapbox.cs.bham.ac.uk">
  <pre wrap="">x wrote:

  </pre>
  <blockquote type="cite">
    <pre wrap="">I would use marked up text, either xml or xhtml. Providing a filter to
remove the tags is straight-forward. Styling via a set of standard
cascading style sheets (CSS) would then give you a specific look and
feel.
    </pre>
  </blockquote>
  <pre wrap=""><!---->
I think this is a dreadful idea; those languages are *not* convenient
to write. And XML isn't "marked up text", even though that's its
historical origin - the pointy-bracket structure is fundamental to
an XML document, rather than being mere decoration.
  </pre>
</blockquote>
Sorry Chris, I can't let this go. Clearly the view of someone not
working in the text processing industry, to whom using XML purely for
data markup is just an amusing curiosity. I don't deny its an issue
though - there are two distinct ways of using XML which ultimately boil
down to whether you allow element content to be free text *interspersed
with* XML elements or not. Sounds pretty trivial but actually has quite
a big impact on the kinds of things you want to do and what tools you
should use to do it.<br>
<br>
But I agree that the achilles heel of XML is that it's painful (though
in principle possible) to edit XML by hand, but there remains, even
after these several years of XML development, a dearth of decent
customisable tools to make the job easy (there's a good number of
generic tools, of course, but they don't really support the kind of
ease-of-use hype that surrounds XML).<br>
<br>
The tex/data markup issue is blurred by using 'standoff' markup, which
might be worth at least thinking about in this context. The idea of
standoff markup is that you represent text-style markup as a separate
parallel data-style XML object, which contains pointers into the text
document. Its nice because its not invasive, and ebcause you can have
parallel multiple markups of a text that are not tree-structured with
respect to one another (type 'standoff markup' into google for more
info on it). So Steve could have one file which is plain text, and a
parallel file that marks up hyperlinks, text attributes etc in it, for
systems that want to exploit that. The downside is that your 'document'
is potentially distributed across multilple files that can get out of
sync...<br>
<br>
Roger<br>
<br>
</body>
</html>

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