4.0561 Markup and Related Topics (4/105)

Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Wed, 3 Oct 90 22:55:06 EDT

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 0561. Wednesday, 3 Oct 1990.



(1) Date: Wed, 3 Oct 90 08:33:41 -0400 (EDT) (14 lines)
From: Leslie Burkholder <lb0q+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: markup vs wysiwyg

(2) Date: Wed, 03 Oct 90 17:23:07 CDT (69 lines)
From: "Michael S. Hart" <HART@UIUCVMD>
Subject: Re: 4.0551 TEI, SGML, and Real Word Processing

(3) Date: Wed, 03 Oct 90 18:16:57 EDT (5 lines)
From: Frank Dane <FDANE@UGA>
Subject: Re: 4.0551 TEI, SGML, and Real Word Processing

(4) Date: Tue, 02 Oct 90 21:38:38 EDT (17 lines)
From: "Adam C. Engst" <PV9Y@CORNELLA>
Subject: Re: 4.0547 ... Real Word Processing

(1) --------------------------------------------------------------35----
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 90 08:33:41 -0400 (EDT)
From: Leslie Burkholder <lb0q+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: markup vs wysiwyg

Can anyone provide references to comparisons of explicit markup
word-processing programs (eg, Tex, Scribe) vs wysiwyg ones (eg,
MacWrite)? I am interested in studies concerning such things as ease of
use, ease of learning, user confidence, user support needs, etc.

(Please, not personal experiences, but studies like controlled
experiments aimed at refuting or confirming some hypothesis.)

Leslie Burkholder
CMU
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------78----
Date: Wed, 03 Oct 90 17:23:07 CDT
From: "Michael S. Hart" <HART@UIUCVMD>
Subject: Re: 4.0551 TEI, SGML, and Real Word Processing (3/103)

The following showed up in my mailer apparently quite coincidentally:
It was sandwiched between two other messages about Lou Burnard and TEI
which have been deleted. My comments follow the message, which appears
here intact.

On Tue, 2 Oct 90 21:26:29 EDT you said:
>Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 0551. Tuesday, 2 Oct 1990.
>Date: Tue, 2 Oct 90 9:52 GMT
>From: Don Fowler <DPF@vax.oxford.ac.uk>
>Subject: RE: 4.0547 The WP Saga's Markup Moral; Real Word Processing? (2/45)
>
>Lou Burnard is of course right about procedural markup, but the problem
>is that for most people it is an awful bind to set up their system so
>that explicit SGML type tags can be used (you have to write the macros,
>however rudimentary). What is necessary is to get the major commercial
>WP programs to provide an SGML import/export facility, so that one could
>use the easy facilities within the program for footnotes, font changes
>(esp. between languages - the problem with moving Greek or Hebrew
>between WPs) etc but then choose to have the text output with tags. Of
>course there would have to be sensible (and changeable) equivalencies
>between typographical and logical markup, which could never be perfect
>(is that underlining emphasis, a title or what?), but it would help a
>lot and would me more use to most people than large expensive SGML
>editors (which I gather exist). How about putting pressure on Microsoft
>and WP Corp to provide something like this?
>
> Don Fowler
>
"What is necessary is to get the major commercial
WP programs to provide an SGML import/export facility...."

What would appear more reasonable would be for SGML to
support the more general access provided by normal ASCII files
such as this one, wierd header not included (I don't write the
headers, you know.) This is a fine example of the attitude of
those who write what I read about SGML and TEI. They want the
whole world to adapt itself to them, and to support their new,
not yet perfected manner of doing things. I say TEI and SGML,
in their finite wisdom should find it easy to provide etexts a
normal person with a normal word processor can take quotations
from without any further ado, should they be writing articles,
papers, columns, taking notes or whatever.

Project Gutenberg supports electronic text in general and does
not seek to recommend any one format over any other.

Thank you for your interest,

Michael S. Hart, Director, Project Gutenberg
National Clearinghouse for Machine Readable Texts

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(3) --------------------------------------------------------------13----
Date: Wed, 03 Oct 90 18:16:57 EDT
From: Frank Dane <FDANE@UGA>
Subject: Re: 4.0551 TEI, SGML, and Real Word Processing (3/103)

Pardon my ignorance--what is SGML?
(4) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 02 Oct 90 21:38:38 EDT
From: "Adam C. Engst" <PV9Y@CORNELLA>
Subject: Re: 4.0547 The WP Saga's Markup Moral; Real Word Processing?

In regard to the request for a text manipulation environment, I can only
point to the long-awaited Xanadu from hypertext visionary Ted Nelson. I
haven't the time to post more information now, but in the near future I
will be releasing a special issue of TidBITS devoted to thoughts from the
Ted Nelson World Tour that a friend in Sweden saw and recorded. I'll
post an announcement when I send it out and give instructions on how
to find that issue of TidBITS for those that don't already know how.

Adam Engst

Adam C. Engst pv9y@cornella.cit.cornell.edu
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