RE: XML/SGML

["Harrison, Shawn" Shawn_Harrison@xxxxxxxx]

Hi, Nathan. Thanks for your informative comments.


It would not be at all hard to make a keyboard to write SGML or
XML files in XY, and of course a macro to convert them (in fact I
still have the latter).


Yes, if you want to edit the SGML directly in a text-only fashion. But to
use XyWrite formatting to mirror SGML/XML formatting so as to edit those
document types in a "WYSIW.." fashion? See my other post today, in
response to Leslie B. Here is what I said, in brief: "As far as tweaking
XyWrite goes, I'm skeptical. The formatting paradigm has inherent
limitations. XyWrite's approach of turning "on" a style or format until
turned "off" or switched to something else is logically very different
from a system in which "styles" are handled by s that have end
s, nested in a hierarchical arrangement."

Back to N.Sivin:

The problem is that someone still has
to define the markup you need; for instance, SCRIPT, which was
designed for tech manuals, had no provision for footnotes or
bibliography hanging indents. . . . I would suggest, in the interest of
keeping it simple, using HTML markup (a subset of GML) as far as
it goes, and adding to a DTD (the declaration of GML type) all
the additional tags needed.


I would propose using the Docbook DTD, which is comprehensive and has
facilities for all of the publication-oriented tagging structures that
one might need.

If it can be demonstrated that XyWrite's formatting mechanism can handle
a hierarchical tagging scheme of XML & SGML, I would be glad to
contribute as much time and energy as needed/possible to make XyWrite a
"native" SGML editor. I'm itching to begin using it, and I don't want to
spend $1,600 dollars. But I want an "interpreted" rather than "text-only"
SGML editor.

> If you want to use SGML, WordPerfect 8 already supports it.

I've tried it in WordPerfect 7. It's not a very good interface. Rather
than editing a document, I have to spend my time in a little dialog box
choosing between tags. I have to use the mouse or the menus-by-keyboard
to open and close the dialog box for every tag-set that I want to insert.
There doesn't seem to be any mechanism for automating the insertion of
tags from the keyboard. In short, the SGML features are not well
integrated with the word processing features.

Again, if there's something I'm missing about XyWrite's formatting
paradigm that allows it to handle SGML-type / hierarchical tagging in a
natural way, I would be very enthusiastic about contributing to such a
project.

Regards,
Shawn

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shawn_harrison@xxxxxxxx
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