Re: XML/SGML

[Nathan Sivin nsivin@xxxxxxxx]

I had a fair bit of experience with SGML because about 20 years
ago I used to publish a journal, with the camera copy prepared
using IBM Script, a mainframe SGML program, to print out on a
very high-quality printer. 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. It was not hard for a local guru to
write new tags, but someone had to do it. I attach at the end of
this message an example of SCRIPT markup, which as you can see is
close to self-explanatory. I have added a few annotations.

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). 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 won't have time to get involved in
this myself, but I wonder if people who know GML could declare
themselves, and if Carl could then press-gang one of them to
coordinate such a project. It would only take about a day's work
each on the part of 5 people, and a bit more than that on the
part of the czar's. I will be glad to contribute the conversion
macro, a decidedly quick-and-dirty job (no error trapping).

If you want to use SGML, WordPerfect 8 already supports it. The
normal installation does not put it on your disk, but the help
file s.v. "About SGML" explains how to install it. You can then
create, edit, save, etc. SGML documents within WP.

Cheers,
--
Nathan Sivin
History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia PA 19104-6304
(215) 898-7454
nsivin@xxxxxxxx
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Nathan Sivin
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:p.The historical discoveries of the last generation have left no
basis for the old myths that the ancestry of modern science is
exclusively European and that before modern times no other
civilization was able to do science except under European
influence.
We have gradually come to understand that scientific
traditions differing from the European tradition in fundamental
respects&emdash.from techniques, to institutional settings, to
views of nature and man's relation to it&emdash.existed in the
Islamic world, India, and China, and in smaller civilizations as
well.
It has become clear that these traditions and the
tradition of the Occident, far from being separate streams, have
interacted more or less continuously from their beginnings until
they were replaced by local versions of the modern science that
they have all helped to form.