Re: Open Books and XML

[Robert Hopcroft <hopcroft@uswest.net>]

Doug Loss wrote:

> It's intended for electronic book reading systems.  I don't know if it handles
> hyperlinks, but I'm not sure if we want to do links in a textbook anyway.  It
> occurs to me that if the intent of all this is to make texts available for
> schools that may not be able to afford them, making them useable primarily on
> the WWW may be wrong-headed.  If a school can't afford new texts, is it likely
> to be able to keep enough computers internet connected for all the students to
> read our texts on?  It's more likely (I think) that the texts will be printed
> off the net and copied on paper for all the students in a class.

When one textbook requires background information belonging to another subject, I would do it with a
link as opposed to having two instances of the same information. For example, if the computer science
textbook required set theory then I would link to the set theory section of mathematics. To me this
seems more straight forward and maintainable. Also I would keep the textbooks in downloadable digital
format so that a school could simply download whatever they wanted and then serve it out to the students
in whatever way they see fit.

Bob