Re: XML for linguists?

At 6:36 AM -0500 11/10/99, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
>On Tue, 9 Nov 1999, Brook Conner wrote:
>> Extend the DTD as you add features to Kura, e.g., alternative
>> translations.  But I'd go for a fairly rigorous DTD - makes the map
>> from the DTD to internal data structures much clearer.  E.g., (in
>> Haskell, but it should be clear):
>Thanks for the input! This is one area where I don't think I'm really
>competent enought at the moment. I thought I'd go without an explicit
>DTD, but I'll look into it - one of the problems is that I'm a bit
>wary of working with the specification (ever since having tried to
>build a mail-reader using only RFC's), and the bookshops are full of
>junk that look like hasty rewrites of junk on HTML.
Brook is right about the DTD. It's very helpful. The spec. is _far_ less
helpful than the typical RFC, thogh the maze of mail RFCs is a worst case
for the IETF.

>> Goldfarb should be good, even if it isn't O'Reilly - he literally
>> wrote the book on SGML.
>>
>
>Have you used the book yourself? If it's really good, I'll be ordering
>it tonight...
It's the final reference work, and contains the complete standard, but it's
way to complete to learn from. Goldfarb never met a fewature of SGML (no
matter how vile) that he didn't like.

I'd recommend Eric van Herwijnen's (sp?) introduction to SGML, or maybe one
of the annotated XML specification books out there. The XML spec. is _way_
easier than the full SGML spec, though some background is helpful in a frwe
tricky areas.

  -- David
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