S.P.Q.Rahtz@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Sebastian Rahtz) (09/30/90)
Lou Burnard has an internal problem posting to usenet, so until he fixes it, I am posting this for him: > My apologies for ignoring Sebastian's suggestion that the full name of > Electronic Publishing - Origination Dissemination and Design should not > be abbreviated. Henceforth I shall always refer to the Communications > of the Association for Computing Machinery as such also. I also accept > the justice of his (and others') comments that SGML elements for the > other constituents of a bibliographic list are sadly lacking. My only > defence is that this was intended as a very simple example to show > what could be achieved by tagging a text in this way. So far as I know > nowhere in the Guidelines does it suggest that this level of granularity > would be appropriate for anything other than a simple personal reading > list. Definition of tags corresponding with AACR2 or other bibliographic > standards seems a somewhat redundant task, but clearly easy enough to > do. Is that really what people want to use when they type in their > bibliographies? > > I'm puzzled by the phrase "holier than thou" in Seb's note. What does > it mean? on what grounds? and let me take the opportunity to point out that the normal abbrevation for the Communications of the .... is CACM, and that as far as I am aware the normal abbreviation for Electronic Publishing.... is EPODD whenever I type in a bibliographical entry, I want it to be the last time I ever have to do so. so i try to get it right, and stash it in a central location. being a believer in generic markup, i try not to distinguish between `personal reading lists' and `real reading lists'. if i wanted to send someone something that was intended to be *read*, i would of course not send them SGML! the Text Encoding Initiative document is a many-splendoured thing, redolent of the mysterious east, caribbean evenings and the scent of fresh pine in the himalayas. its also parochial (being biased strongly towards western cultural traditions). i think my `holier than thou' criticism is founded almost entirely on my perusal of the reading list! question: why do SGMLers type their tags in upper case? is it in some way suggested by the standards?
enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) (10/01/90)
In article <29321.9009301330@manutius.ecs.soton.ac.uk> S.P.Q.Rahtz@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Sebastian Rahtz) writes:
question: why do SGMLers type their tags in upper case? is it in some
way suggested by the standards?
I may consider myself an "SGMLer", and I never type my tags in upper
case. In Burnard's sample, start-tags were in upper-case, end-tags in
lower case. I found this more confusing than helpful. Besides, the
use of dots in the tag names did NOT make it very readable. At one
point, the text violated its own DTD, something like
<citn.struct>
<author><CITN.STRUCT>
The use of explicit end-tags where omittable was not consistent, and I
found the entire thing totally useless. It seems it was not the
product of the TEI, after all, now. I'm happy to see that.
I frequently distribute text in SGML format when I think the reader
will have any use of the structuring, otherwise, I run the text off
and send an ASCII version or a nicely laid out paper. Basically,
"have any use of" means being able to process the stuff, index with
it, or gain a better understanding of the contents when read at a
terminal. Sort of like when it's more important to send information
than representation.
PS: Are S.P.Q.R your real initials? Any links to the Empire? :-)
--
[Erik Naggum] Naggum Software; Gaustadalleen 21; 0371 OSLO; NORWAY
I disclaim, <erik@naggum.uu.no>, <enag@ifi.uio.no>
therefore I post. +47-295-8622, +47-256-7822, (fax) +47-260-4427doug@eris.berkeley.edu (Doug Merritt) (10/11/90)
In article <29321.9009301330@manutius.ecs.soton.ac.uk> S.P.Q.Rahtz@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Sebastian Rahtz) writes: >[for] Lou Burnard: >the Text Encoding Initiative document is a many-splendoured thing, >redolent of the mysterious east, caribbean evenings and the scent of >fresh pine in the himalayas [...] Very poetic. But really, what is it? Doug Doug Merritt doug@eris.berkeley.edu (ucbvax!eris!doug) or uunet.uu.net!crossck!dougm