Re: Lou Burnard's "Subject: How far SGML?"
Lou must have strong confidence in his friendships to have posted an exchange between Stig Johansson and Bob Amsler "without asking permission of either of them." Stig's queries ("Does everything have to be expressed through SGML? Is it good for all types of texts? ... Even if SGML can be made to do the work, is it the best way for all texts and all types of textual features?), in light of his subsequent comment, can be understood to ask whether KNOWLEDGE/ANALYSIS OF ALL KINDS *about* a text is best represented, in all kinds of texts, by SGML. Amsler's (posted) response in paraphrase (..."whether SGML should always be used to represent all texts...category of material") seems to focus on format and content, and validation of these. Stig's question seems to ask about propriety, economy, felicity. When I remind everyone that we need character-level and morpheme-level annotations on texts for representation of codices, textual criticism and linguistic analysis -- the question may be whether we WANT to use an SGML id marker for every character in the text, or whether we hand off some of the cross-referencing/parsing problems to applications software. I may be wrong in this interpretation of the exchange, but even if so, let me expand the question. Part of the issue seems to be: when should we let the applications do type-checking on the data (Amsler eliminates program code from SGML coding because compilers do the validation) and when do we declare detailed rules in a document DTD? If the applications already exist, the question is moot: they validate or they do not. In other cases, it's a fresh choice: new text being authored or structured, and new software process the encoded text. Do we require that the exchange format (SGML) validate *everything* that the local application controls with integrity checks? An example would be citations, whether of bibliographic data or internal references in classical literature. One *could* use SGML (the DTD, with entities, attributes and tags) in an authoring system to make sure that nobody ever typed "Sirach 23:30" (since Sirach chapter 23 has fewer than 30 verses). Is that the best way to validate the legitimacy of citations? Or is there a more economical way for ALL applications to validate citations, so that we can leave deep-level SGML structuring markup out of the interchange format? This is a more benign case than worries Stig, though (I think). He seems to be concerned with the important matter of representing knowledge and analysis of texts (not visible, surface features having to do with rules of containment) and questioning whether SGML always the best way to do this. Perhaps Bob answered adequately, and it's taking me a while to see how Bob's generalization answers all the questions. rcc |
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