Roger.Evans@itri.brighton.ac.uk wrote:
> 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,
That's true,
> to whom using XML purely for data markup is just an amusing curiosity.
But I don't understand this comment.
I've written HTML by hand (well, by Ved), and using Quanta. I presume there
are significantly more helpful tools around. As soon as the markup gets
heavy (typically at the first hyperlink ...) I can't see the text any
more.
I don't deny that XML has become the de-facto inplementation of S-expressions,
nor that one could mark up ordinary text using it and do useful things.
I just don't think that, given the choice, one should be forced to
*create and maintain* text using that form. So long as one can generate
XML [or RDF ...] at will, we can arrange portability and cheap legacy.
[This assumes that it's expensive, in some resource or other, to create
a suitable editor from scratch, so that one is using WYSIWYN [... You Need.]
EG for a typical Wiki, your editor is whatever <textarea> gives you ...]
> 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...
I think that kills the idea stone dead.
--
Chris "electric hedgehog" Dollin
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