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Subject: RE: DOCBOOK: Technical DTDs vs. non-technical


Alvaro Siman worte:ˆ 
| 
| There is one thing that I am not clear on, with respect to DocBook.
| 
| Lets keep using plays as an example where abilities get stretched.  One very
| important aspect of plays, that you wont find in computer documentation, is
| the concept of 'voice'.
| 
| Plays are concerned with 'first person', 'omnipresence', ect..  History
| books are concerned with the <DocAuthor> spending a whole lot of time
| referencing and talking about other authors and historical figures. It is
| not always a simple two-way conversation either.  I find myself documenting
| authors quoting authors that are quoting other authors frequently.  At this
| point, it gets confusing. 

I use entities to ensure consistency in spelling names of historical
figures and buildings; so far I have linked not to occurrances of their 
names but to sections that discuss them.  If I wanted to link to 
every occurrance, I suppose I would add markup to the entity,
probably <phrase role="mosque">Great Mosque of Aleppo</phrase>
and then figure out how to link to it; this looks like a good
application of Xpath (as I could avoid having to generate IDs
for IDREF linking).

| The two concepts are similar in Plays and documentary style texts.  I am not
| clear on how DocBook addresses this, or if it does at all.

Docbook supplies many inlines for its domain of application, which
may have IDs; typically one links not to every occurrance of a 
Function's name (except perhaps in an Index), but to the first
occurrance or some occurrance where significant discussion occurs.
You could do the same for PlayAuthor or FemaleLead if you had
such elements.

As for nested quotes, it's always necessary to ascertain the
context of the quote, to see which author wrote it, but 
once you get that straight, Blockquote markup should help
you keep it straight; I don't know if TEI took a more
elaborate approach.

regards, Terry

| I think you will agree that it is important in both instances (plays and
| history) that it is important for a computer to be able to identify who is
| talking, and who is being talked about.
| 
| Al
| 
| -----Original Message-----
| From: Terry Allen [mailto:tallen@sonic.net]
| Sent: Friday, June 23, 2000 5:37 PM
| To: docbook@lists.oasis-open.org
| Subject: Re: DOCBOOK: Technical DTDs vs. non-technical
| 
| >DocBook was "primarily written for books about computer software and
| hardware". "Because its main structures correspond to the general notion of
| what constitutes a "book,", it is assumed that it automatically addresses
| the needs of Literature in general.
| 
| Not really; it was a design goal (of mine) to make Docbook suitable
| also for scholarly publishing.  So if you toss out all the computer-
| related inlines and structures, and ignore some things like QandASet
| that you probably don't need, you ought to have a DTD that you can
| use to format a scholarly book.  If you find deficiencies we'd
| like to hear of them.  
| 
| Several folks pointed you to TEI, and remarked that it's mostly 
| oriented to analysis - and if that's what you want, then you should
| use TEI.  For example, if you want to mark up <couplet> you need
| TEI; if you only want to typeset a poem, <literallayout> will do.
| 
| TEI also covers genres Docbook doesn't, such as plays and (I think)
| dictionary entries.  
| 
| regards, Terry
| 


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