Re: XML for linguists?

Boudewijn Rempt wrote:

> > > I'm wondering if there is or should be some kind of
> > > XML definition for language parsing.
> I wouldn't store the texts in XML form, but in a
> relational database. XML texts can be readily mapped to a normalized
> database, and then take far less space, and they can be extracted and
> put into a DOM form just as easily as if if they would be read from
> a text file in xml format.
The XML is more of an interchange format, as I see it.
I guess there would be 100 standardized grammatical tags,
each with a dozen possible values ...

Being impractical, I'd like both to preserve the surface appearance
of the text, as in the interlinear version you posted earlier,
and the parse tree, somehow, as in DB's Penn-tree example. Hopefully,
this is not just like asking for a square circle in 2 dimensions.