On Wed, 30 Jun 2004, Martin Holmes wrote:
Hi all,
I like this terminology. I think also there will be situations where one person's markup, which they considered to be objective and transparent, in the future becomes a text which is the subject of someone else's markup. We could envisage a time when early markup projects become the subject of scholarly investigation, and both their source markup and their various textual renderings (medialisations?) are themselves marked up. Re-reading my own comment "The markup merely strives after completeness and transparency", I guess that's a pretty big "merely".
We don't need to "envisage a time when early markup projects become the subject of scholarly investigation", there are those who study just this. The OTA has been collecting electronic texts for nearly 30 years... very few of them are actually in XML. The study of earlier markup forms (like say COCOA) is undertaken by those looking at the history of humanities computing. I gave a paper at the ALLC-ACH this year looking at the problems the OTA might have in migrating copies of its resources to XML. (A big undertaking...) A lot of the pilot study for this involved the identification and scoping of what form of markup those resources listed as "unknown markup" really were in.
All of this goes to a point (believe it or not), that the documenation of your chosen encoding scheme and why you've put $ before all the adjectives (or whatnot) is one of the most important aspects for its preservation.
-James
--- Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford James dot Cummings at ota dot ahds dot ac dot uk