Let me second Peter Baker's thanks. This is a great gift. -dan
Peter Baker wrote:
Bless you, Peter, for open sourcing this! It is a great gift to the scholarly world. I hope you'll let us know the URL on Sourceforge, when the site is ready.
Peter
Peter Robinson wrote:
Dear everyone I have been away a few days without a chance to look at the correspondence provoked by my message about XSLT etc.
Firstly: a quick response to Lou Burnard. Of course I have known for years, even before Lou told me, and Lou has known for years that I have known, that one could use alternative XML structures to show our materials page by page, if we want. But this seems to me to go right against one of the fundamental design tenets of XML. Once you decide that you will structure the XML primarily to achieve just one particular display, well, you might as well use pdf (gasp!). The point is that page breaks and div elements coexist in the one document, sometimes you want to see it by pages, sometimes by the text divisions, and that's that. Lou suggests also that one could encode every word in a word element, with the page breaks neatly between the word elements. Only problem here are those cursed scribes who will insist on sticking a page break in the middle of a word. So I guess we need to put every letter in a separate element!
Enough of this. Better than argument is actual demonstration. Some of you probably know that the subtext of what I have been saying about the defects of XSLT is that we have over many years developed our own electronic publishing system, the blessed Anastasia, designed to meet exactly the kind of problems I first met some ten years ago in SGML (as then) processing. We decided a while ago, after much urging from many (including aforesaid Lou) that we would make her open source. So that is just what we are doing. As of today you can download all the executables from
http://www.cta.dmu.ac.uk/~ftpuser/Anastasia/ See too http://www.cta.dmu.ac.uk/~ftpuser/Anastasia/home.html And for an introduction to her: http://www.cta.dmu.ac.uk/~ftpuser/Anastasia/whatis.html
More coming later. The source will go on SourceForge in the next few weeks, together with lots of sample documents, including many in tei.
All the best Peter
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