Re: Open Book

[Bruno Vernier <vernier@vc.bc.ca>]

On Wed, Jul 21, 1999 at 06:42:00PM -0400, 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.

For those who are just beginning to learn XML: XML is a generic format (a 
parent in object-oriented-speak) and the following are some implementations or 
children (in o-o-speak) of XML:

XHTML (strict HTML not the loose HTML many of us have been spoiled with)
Docbook (now has a pure XML implementation for publishing documents
         I think it is used by O'Reilly for all their books, for example)
MathML (the emerging standard for math markup; amaya the browser supports it 
        natively)
ChemML (for representing chemical formulae)
MSML (Microsoft's new XML for word , (yes they are heavily into it too)
EduML (little known open proposal as a standard for Education Data)

and you can safely expect to see a lot more relevant XML Markup Languages:

at the beginning of 1999, they were some 2000 known XML markup languages.


So to answer Doug's question, if we are writing textbooks, we can do it in a 
combination of Docbook (for the publishing effect), and EduML (for links to 
the relevant outcomes in the curriculum that are matched by the various 
sections of Docbook).

Bruno