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greg said:
> The primary thing is that the text be properly structured
> for the widest possible uses now and in the future.
that _sounds_ good. until you realize that -- depending on
how one defines "properly structured", and how one considers
"the widest possible uses", not to mention the crystal-ball on
"the future" -- doing heavy markup might be _very_ expensive.
so expensive -- quite literally -- that we cannot afford to do it.
heck, did you notice that -- until google decided to step in --
we couldn't even find funds to _scan_ the books in our libraries.
and scanning is dirt-cheap compared to applying heavy-markup.
and the other thing to keep in mind is that society is generating
new content at a numbing rate, a rate that's even ever-increasing!
and precious little of that content is marked up, not even in .html.
so, you know, in _my_ humble opinion (as people say), the idea
that we can make the _assumption_ that our data is marked up
-- and marked up with something intense like .tei -- is _silly_...
to the point of -- in my _humble_ opinion -- being ridiculous...
(a strong word, even extreme, but i think it is fully appropriate,
since -- as far as i can see -- this assumption has zero reality.)
would it be _nice_ if all our text could be extensively marked up,
such that it could magically be transformed any way we wanted?
well, _sure_ it would. it'd be _great_.
but, considered from the cost-benefit perspective that everything
must work under in our world, the benefits don't even come _close_
to justifying the very high costs of applying that extensive markup.
so we need something else, which gives us _most_ of the benefits,
at a _much_ lower cost. and that "something else" is light-markup.
> At least at the start of the thread this seem to be the main concern,
> how to adapt Gutenberg's resources for this Second digital revolution.
actually, the thread started out only as an attempt to
make a checklist of techniques that people have used
to make p.g. e-texts look _typographically_beautiful_...
> I will have a look at ZML when I get the chance,
> it is possible it might just be the thing
you're welcome to look at it, but i can pretty much tell you now that it
won't be a good fit, because your head wants an "ideal" markup system
-- which anticipates "any possible use, now or in the future" -- whereas
z.m.l. is fully grounded in the tradeoffs that a cost-benefit ratio demands.
> I find it incredibly hard to imagine a simple solution
> to such a complex problem of marking up literature, storing it
well, once you find out how little it costs, and the huge benefits it returns,
you might be surprised. but it's because you see the problem as "complex"
that i said you wouldn't be a good fit with z.m.l. you're one of those people
who love complexity. that's ok. doesn't mean that you're a bad person... :+)
-bowerbird
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