[tei-council] "Getting Started" update

[Peter Boot]

David Sewell schreef:
> I've written a good chunk, but not all, of a first draft of the 
> Technical Background chapter, and updated Sourceforge. 

Thank you, David. This looks quite good.

> 1. I started a section on namespaces, but I wonder if the topic should 
> be introduced later. It is probably the trickiest thing to explain as 
> part of a basic introduction.

I think it's unavoidable. People will get confused if we don't explain 
what this 'tei:' thing is than can apparently appear or not appear at 
random. The stylesheets for instance use the prefix everywhere.

> 2. I will have no trouble creating very basic examples of the use of CSS 
> and XSLT to transform simple XML for browser viewing (using the nursery 
> rhyme example). But, Peter, I'm not quite sure what you mean in your 
> original outline by:
> 
> "The web, web servers, html, browsers. One very simple HTML example, 
> then point to other resources: 5p"
> 
> Do you mean that "Technical Background" should include basic information 
> about all of those things? Can we not assume that for practical purposes 
> most readers of this document will already know about them?
> 
> My thought was that it should be possible to talk about HTML 
> sufficiently in the context of "how to get from XML to the browser".

I regularly meet people for whom the word 'browser' doesn't mean much. 
They 'open the internet' on their computer without realising that they 
are opening a browser, and that they might use another browser. My idea 
was that it would be good to explain this. That opening a browser and 
asking for a page with a url means that the browser asks a server 
identified by the first part of the url for that page. It may be true 
that if you need to be explained things at that level you probably won't 
get far though.

There were a few places in your draft which I felt were perhaps too 
difficult for beginners. You use the word 'parse' without explanation. 
And the 'should be fairly intuitive' in the explanation of the DTD might 
make beginners think that this is not for them.

Thanks again.

Peter