Re: Open Book

[Robert Hopcroft <hopcroft@uswest.net>]

Doug Loss wrote:

> Our premier XML effort is EDUML by Bruno Vernier.  It's aimed at representing
> all kinds of educational data, but I don't think it's intended for
> representation of text similar to HTML (tell us if I'm wrong, Bruno).  For that
> we should probably pick some other XML-based language designed for it.
> Actually, HTML, properly used, isn't too bad at that.  I've used the DocBook
> DTD in SGMLTools to create a document that could be rendered as HTML, LaTeX,
> PostScript, ASCII, and probably some other formats, and that worked very
> nicely.  I'll look into XML languages aimed at publishing and see what's
> available.  I'd still like people to take a close look at Rohit's paper to see
> if we should try to get this on Linux.  I think it may be a good idea.

Isn't the Linux Documentation Project going to be XML based. At one time there was
a real nice post giving how we thought we should do things, frontends, backends and
an XML data representation. I will try and find that and but it together with
information on understanding XML. Three times someone has asked, "How to get
started with XML?", always without any response. There is also a book on XML, that
someone recommended. I'll find that too. Several weeks ago, I was at the local
university bookstore and I noticed that they have at least a dozen books on XML. It
would be nice to know which are the good ones. Looking at EDUML, it appears that
things are being tagged. For example, first name, last name, etc. This leads me to
believe that I can use XML to tag text as question, answer, definition, and other
things as pronunciation, video clip, whatever. In any case, I noticed that Rohit's
paper was produced under a government contract and thus should be in the public
domain? However it could be extended or enhanced as a commercial product, in which
case, one would probably have to pay to use the latest and greatest. Anyway more of
my thoughts.

Bob