Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!icdoc!sot-ecs!Sebastian
From: S.P.Q.Rahtz@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Sebastian Rahtz)
Newsgroups: comp.text.sgml
Subject: Burnard SGML reading list
Message-ID: <29321.9009301330@manutius.ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: 30 Sep 90 13:30:21 GMT
Sender: spqr@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Lines: 43
In-Reply-To: <9009292013.AA02277@uk.ac.oxford.ws>

Lou Burnard has an internal problem posting to usenet, so until he
fixes it, I am posting this for him:

 > My apologies for ignoring Sebastian's suggestion that the full name of
 > Electronic Publishing - Origination Dissemination and Design should not
 > be abbreviated. Henceforth I shall always refer to the Communications
 > of the Association for Computing Machinery as such also. I also accept
 > the justice of his (and others') comments that SGML elements for the
 > other constituents of a bibliographic list are sadly lacking. My only
 > defence is that this was intended as a very simple example to show
 > what could be achieved by tagging a text in this way. So far as I know
 > nowhere in the Guidelines does it suggest that this level of granularity
 > would be appropriate for anything other than a simple personal reading
 > list. Definition of tags corresponding with AACR2 or other bibliographic
 > standards seems a somewhat redundant task, but clearly easy enough to
 > do. Is that really what people want to use when they type in their
 > bibliographies? 
 > 
 > I'm puzzled by the phrase "holier than thou" in Seb's note. What does
 > it mean? on what grounds?


and let me take the opportunity to point out that the normal
abbrevation for the Communications of the .... is CACM, and that as
far as I am aware the normal abbreviation for Electronic
Publishing.... is EPODD

whenever I type in a bibliographical entry, I want it to be the last
time I ever have to do so. so i try to get it right, and stash it in a
central location. being a believer in generic markup, i try not to
distinguish between `personal reading lists' and `real reading lists'.
if i wanted to send someone something that was intended to be *read*,
i would of course not send them SGML!

the Text Encoding Initiative document is a many-splendoured thing,
redolent of the mysterious east, caribbean evenings and the scent of
fresh pine in the himalayas. its also parochial (being biased strongly
towards western cultural traditions). i think my `holier than thou'
criticism is founded almost entirely on my perusal of the reading
list!

question: why do SGMLers type their tags in upper case? is it in some
way suggested by the standards?