[huml-comment] Re: LMNL toolkit for HumanML

[Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@rbii.com>]

On Saturday 15 February 2003 02:27 am, Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga wrote:
> I really think that by allowing for multiple overlapping layers and ranges,
> we can seemlessly account for multiple interpretations and perspectives,
> embedded within the document.  Gavin mentioned that he would be interested
> in perhaps helping develop an LMNL toolkit for HumanML, and he could
> present it to us in some form (Gavin:  I'll let you take it from here ;))

Hi, and I apologise for getting back so late on this thread... things have 
been rather hectic, as always. Anyway, from my (limited) understanding of 
HumanML, I think LMNL is a useful syntax alternative to XML. 

Overlapping ranges, occur in human communication, and more importantly, the 
*interpretation* of communication, far more than most people realize. This is 
a direct effect of the multiple interpretations of a given sequence of text 
that is common: we all have a (however slightly) different way of looking at 
things, and this is often reflected in markup, and the markup wars that 
people have (it should be called a "p", not a "para"!).

Interestingly enough, given it's document-centric background, XML does *not* 
handle overlaps and multiple interpretations particularly well (SGML was 
somewhat better, especially if you used CONCUR and/or SHORTREF combined with 
multiple SGML declarations). You *can* mark things up, with milestones and 
the like, but the markup tends to feel somewhat unnatural. IMHO, LMNL should 
be easier to author... but that's an opinion that needs to be tested in the 
waters of real world application (FWIW. I think it's be easy enough to use 
the Java Swing text component to write a LMNL editor).

I was thinking that it's fairly easy to do a LMNL->XML conversion that would 
use things like milestones and/or attributes to tie overlaps together, so 
that in the worste case, LMNL can ease the authoring side. In addition, I am 
planning to build a formatter that should be applicable to LMNL. The 
formatter would be able to produce either PDF, or somewhat ugly HTML. When I 
mentioned a LMNL toolkit, this is what I was imagining.

I guess I should sign up for the mailing lists?


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