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authorNorbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>2019-09-02 13:46:59 +0900
committerNorbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>2019-09-02 13:46:59 +0900
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+\def\question#1\par{{\noindent\em #1\par}}
+\title{Questions and Answers}
+\author{compiled by Jonathan Fine}
+\begin{Article}
+\bgroup
+\begin{small}
+\def\[#1]{\noindent[{\bf #1}] }
+The last session of the Bridewell meeting was a panel comprising
+the speakers David Barron \[DB] and Martin Key \[MK], joined by Lou
+Burnard \[LB] (Oxford, Text Encoding Initiative) and David Evans \[DE]
+(part of David Brailsford's group in Nottingham). The session was
+chaired by David Penfold \[DP] from the co-sponsors, the
+BCS Electronic Publishing Special Group.
+
+(I have prepared this report from a not always audible tape
+recording. Remarks have been edited. I hope I have not introduced
+any error or misrepresentation. Questions have been set in
+italics.---Jonathan Fine)
+
+\question What solutions are there going from one encoding method to
+another, say from Microsoft to \LaTeX?
+
+\[LB] I recommend via SGML as internal format. The public domain tool
+Rainbow Makers has an interesting approach. It takes a document
+marked up with formatting codes, and turns those codes into SGML
+tags. So you do get terrible things such as tags for font and
+type-size, but now they are represented using the SGML format.
+Translating from that to real SGML is a lot easier.
+
+\[DP] {\em Word-for-Word\/} has been well used in the publishing
+industry for years. It converts between stacks of mainly
+word-processor (but also Frame for example) formats. I expect they
+will eventually get round to SGML.
+
+\[Malcolm Clark]
+\question
+If all I'm interested in is portable documents, in other words
+shifting a document from one site to another electronically, why
+don't I just standardise on Microsoft Word? It's not high enough
+quality for publishing, but for 90\% of what I do, memos and stuff like
+that, I do it in Word and attach it to the electronic mail message I
+am sending. The recipient at a Windows or Macintosh unbundles it and
+they've got it in the same format I created it in. It's solved all
+the problems.
+
+\[LB] Because then you can only talk to people who've done the same
+thing.
+
+\[MK] Several answers. As a company, Elsevier wishes to retain
+the material they produce for some considerable time. We still sell
+material that is 10 or 20 years old. Microsoft Word as a format is
+fine for sending it off today, but in 10 years time, who knows? It
+probably won't be compatible with anything. So retaining it in that
+format is no use. We have to convert it into something we can do
+things with. Secondly, there are limitations with what you can do
+with a Word document. Such as how you can search text, specifying
+where the author's name is, etc. SGML allows us to structure
+the complete document properly.
+
+\[DB] There is a distinction between portability for immediate
+delivery and portability for archiving (see his article). Also,
+Warwick University (MC's location) must be different from
+Southampton, where no such uniformity exists. For example computer
+scientists use \TeX. The problem is like herding sheep to get them
+to move in the same direction.
+
+\[Allan Reese] Word is not a standard, it's a mess. At our site we
+have different versions of Word on different platforms, and they have
+different and incompatible document formats. The lowest common
+denominator of portability is to have the text transmitted from one
+place to another. With the Internet this is generally not possible.
+As soon as you are using a particular character set lying outside
+ASCII you are lost. One example is a text file (produced by a
+software company) which was transferred from Mac Word to Win Word
+without being checked carefully. The left quote character had come
+out as a `O' slash. These funny things happen. Another example is
+from Spain, sent to a news group. The sender has the character `\~n'
+on his keyboard. He presses this key and it comes out as `\~n'
+on the screen. He sends it to me and it comes out as `\$'.
+He can't even send the word `Espa\~nol' to the Spanish language news
+group! Transmission of text is a big problem which a lot of users
+haven't yet tackled. In academic publishing one will have to deal
+with multiple character sets, if only to be to accomodate authors'
+names.
+
+\[Jonathan Fine]
+\question
+Two related questions. Firstly, where will we be in the year 2000?
+If we have a meeting here in five years time, what will have
+happened? Secondly, if SGML succeeds, what will fail?
+
+\[LB] In five years time people will talking about Microsoft in rather
+the same way we talk about IBM. Remember IBM, they used to make
+computers. What will fail will be the forces of the evil empire.
+Namely the idea that it is perfectly legal and correct
+for any software company or equipment vendor to take information away
+from the people who have created it and lock it up in a proprietary
+format. That is an idea that I really would like to see the end of.
+(Others expressed doubt at the early demise of Microsoft.)
+
+\[MK] As a publisher, still dependent on paper. Five years is not
+very long. Unless an electronic product appears that is really user
+friendly to read for any length of time, we will still want paper.
+There will be more electronic products, particularly on CD-ROM. In
+our environment a lot of specific document formats will probably
+fail. Ventura Publisher for example. People will concentrate
+on just three or four products eventually. \LaTeX\ and \TeX\ will
+still be around, and a few word processors.
+
+\[Sebastian Rahtz]
+\question
+A slightly heretical question about maths and chemistry. A lot of
+effort has gone into providing DTDs for these things. Perhaps these
+will just wither and die. In five years time perhaps we will stop
+pretending that math is structured and regard it in the same way as
+we regard graphics? Would any one like to defend the SGML markup of
+maths?
+
+\[MK] The only reason it is useful, is that it is independent of
+fonts. With \LaTeX\ you are still dependent on the font. When we
+combine different articles into a book, we want a uniform appearance.
+We don't want a mixture of fonts, otherwise we're back to the
+horrible camera ready copy. As for the fact that SGML maths is
+structured, I wouldn't particularly want to defend it.
+
+There was quite some discussion of this from the floor, which the
+tape recorder did not clearly pick up.
+
+\[Dina Desai]
+\question
+We would like to use SGML markup for our maths. What would you
+suggest?
+
+\[DB] Do you mean what DTD, or what software, or both? {\em What
+DTD?}
+
+(Some information given by Mike Popham about specific math
+DTDs.)
+
+\[Gerard van Nes]
+The whole problem with maths and SGML is that we simply need an SGML
+editing program which is able to display as we write such
+complicated formulae. It is of course very uncomfortable to write
+the huge amount of mark-up as one needs for SGML maths. But if you
+have a really good SGML editor it's no problem at all.
+
+\[DB] I would have for maths a single tag, which says \verb"<maths>"
+with an attribute which is notation, whose values will obviously be
+\verb"tex", \verb"eqn", etc. If you know it's \verb"eqn" or
+whatever, it is searchable. You can put hyperlinks into it.
+
+\question
+About DTDs. About compound documents really. Say someone wants a
+journal with a video snip of the author explaining the article, a sound
+bite, or what have you. Where would one get a DTD for this?
+
+\[DB] Much the same as the maths. A tag that says \verb"<sound>" and
+an attribute which says which encoding scheme you are using.
+
+\[LB] There is an application of SGML called HyTime which is (about
+to become?) an ISO Standard. It defines time-based media of all
+kinds and also different architectures within which you can associate
+events happening in time. There is one product that can function
+against HyTime specifications, it is something to watch out for.
+There is in the TEI Guidelines a simplified version of some HyTime
+concepts.
+
+\[DB] In the latest issue of EPodd there is a paper with the title
+{\em Why Use HyTime?}
+
+\[Angus Duggan]
+\question
+Adobe put a lot of effort into Acrobat as a static encapsulation
+format, able to reproduce the exact form of documents. Will this in
+the future be important, or will content be all? Will the first
+published form of the document be important?
+
+\[DE] For archival purposes things like Acrobat are very useful,
+because they can encapsulate exactly how a document looked. For
+other things, such as database access and searching it is the content
+which is more important. So you might want two different electronic
+forms of the document. Also, the printed and on-screen versions of
+the document might be formatted differently.
+
+\[Angus Duggan]
+\question
+If we want to represent content and we do want keep the original form
+it was published in, then obviously Acrobat solves the one problem
+and SGML the other. What thoughts about document formats which
+maintain both equally as well?
+
+\[LB] I'd like to question one of your premises. You talk about the
+orginal form of the document. I think we're going to forget what that
+is very soon. I don't know what the original form of the TEI
+guidelines as published is. It was produced as an SGML document. At
+home it is white letters on a black background. In the office black
+on a white. In yellow on green when I was in Chicago. This was the
+authoring. Similar remarks apply to the printing, on US and UK sized
+paper. We had to do some fiddling around with the page numbers, as
+you can imagine. There is another version of the guidelines which is
+equally authorative and has exactly the same content, and that exists
+on a DynaText screen. It has no page numbers at all. I'm trying to
+make the point that I don't know which is the original form. They're
+all equally valid.
+
+\[MK] When authors have their references in the article they often
+refer to an article in a book by its page number. How on earth will
+you make a reference to a location in an electronic document which
+does not have page numbers?
+
+\[LB] By referring to the logical organisation of the text.
+Paragraph~38 within division~3 of etc.
+
+\[MK] I'm sure that we will eventually have a combined product which
+will have the format and all the structure in it from the SGML. All
+in one product. Because there's so much more you can do with
+that than you can with just PDF. The problem, as David Brailsford
+mentioned this morning, is the Brand-X between the SGML and the PDF.
+Until we can resolve that problem we can get to PDF, but not via the
+generic route, which is what we as publishers want.
+
+\[Allan Reese]
+About chasing up a reference. Page numbers are
+physical objects, and when the document changes the physical indexing
+is out of date. With electronic documents you will go just by
+keyword and content indexing. You won't have to know where it is.
+You just say I want the paper by Fred Smith or whoever.
+
+\[MK] That works when you are searching an electronic product from
+another electronic product. It won't work from a paper to an
+electronic product.
+
+\[Angus Duggan]
+Intermediate version of documents. If people are
+publishing on the Internet, if you put a content link in a document to
+a document being revised, this may change or break the link. So you
+need to have links to particular versions of particular documents.
+
+\[David Coton]
+Chapters and verses are a menace. We are looking at how to regard
+text in an object-oriented way. One big probelm with such a scheme
+is that Bible text has two hierarchical structures. It has chapter -
+verse structure, and it has section - paragraph - sentence structure.
+Both are useful, both are valid. Both are in different circumstances
+necessary. But the two do not coincide. Any object-oriented system
+has difficulty with that. There are ways round it. We are looking
+at introducing small enough units of text to give coincident
+boundaries. SGML also has a problem with this. I'm told that the
+standard allows for dual hierarchies. However, none of the existing
+tools implement it.
+
+\[DB] There is only one product I've seen that supports this CONCUR
+feature, which is the Mark-it parser, which is quite old. This
+problem is discussed in the TEI guidelines. I don't think this is an
+SGML problem. It is a characteristic of textual materials that they
+can be organised in many different ways. This is inherent in the
+nature of text.
+
+\[Jonathan Fine]
+\question
+I'm not sure I should be asking this question. What future for
+typography?
+
+\[MK] If you believe the formatted original will continue, not
+replaced by a large amorphous glob of text, there still is a case
+for typography. It is very important to read something, to
+understand how it's put together. Reading off a screen is difficult
+anyway. Typography is purely there to allow you to read something
+easily and quickly. I can't see any reason why it should disappear.
+Especially as I still believe paper will be around for a while.
+
+\[LB] I think that typography is hard, hard, difficult and very
+important. There are so many people clamouring in the Web and other
+electronic marketplaces, that anything that stands out will be
+enormously important. One of the skills conspicuously missing on the
+Web is good typographic understanding. The skills needed to present
+stuff effectively and well in the electronic medium are really an
+outgrowth from the skills the typographers have developed in the
+past.
+
+\[DP] Typography is one aspect, but information design is perhaps an
+even more important. We've hardly covered information design. If
+more and more people are putting things on the Web and not thinking
+about how they design the document, then the morass of information
+overload is going to get worse and worse.
+
+\[DB] If you go to \verb"www.whitehouse.gov" you'll find that it has
+been done by a professional graphics designer. That really makes it
+stand out on the Web.
+
+\[Mary Dyson] Can I add to that? Typography on the screen. Have we
+got it well sussed? I don't think we have yet. To go back to the
+old chestnut, it's not necessarily just transferring the same
+principles. Italics are not terribly good for emphasis on screen. So
+you want perceptual equivalents of legibility.
+
+\[DP] We've come to a good point to stop. One final thing. The Web
+assumes one model of access to information. There are many others,
+such as browsing, which are virtually impossible on the Web. Maybe we
+should be thinking about how other forms of access to information are
+possible. Can I thank the four people on the panel and everyone
+else, particularly the speakers.
+
+\end{small}
+\egroup
+\end{Article}