[tei-council] "Getting Started" update

[David Sewell]

Peter, thanks for the feedback. I'll continue with the section and
rewrite with an eye toward beginners over the next week or so. (As I'm
not going anywhere for the holidays I expect to have some time to spend
on TEI-related things. To quote a professor I once knew, "I'm looking
forward to the holidays--now I can get some *work* done!")

David

On Mon, 15 Dec 2008, Peter Boot wrote:

> 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
>

-- 
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
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Email: dsewell at virginia.edu   Tel: +1 434 924 9973
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