Re: Getting Started

From: Eugene Eric Kim (eekim@eekim.com)
Date: Sun Jul 23 2000 - 11:27:06 PDT


On 23 Jul 2000, Grant Bowman wrote:

> I see the OHS as a number of sub-projects. My understanding of the
> goal is to allow linking, editing and navigation of data. Much emphasis
> has been on XML representations and the client/browser/editing end.
> Once data is "in" the OHS, this is definately the set of tools
> necessary. But I also see the OHS as a lens through which you can see
> data out on the standard WWW too. The data clearly may become much more
> manageable once "imported" into the OHS or created there natively, but I
> also see a need to link and view data from external sources.

Right. But whether or not data is "imported" (persistently translated) or
temporarily translated (transcoded), the document needs to be transformed
into an intermediate representation in order to support the OHS's
capabilities, such as linking, etc.

The OHS will be able to handle any XML document with a valid schema
easily, with minimal transformation to support some of the OHS's semantics
that aren't part of XML, such as statement IDs. So in order to support
external documents, those documents need to be transformed into some XML
representation.

There is an XML representation for Web pages: XHTML. The reason I
suggested starting with a subset of XHTML is that coming up with global
hierarchy rules for all of XHTML a la Augment will be complicated, and may
not even make sense. In other words, the 1A, 2B3, etc. numbering scheme
made a lot of sense for Augment documents, but I can see various XHTML and
other types of documents where that addressing scheme does not. However,
as a starting point, mainly for the purposes of demoing the system, I
think it's worthwhile to build a small program that uses this scheme,
especially since it's pretty simple. Plus, Doug loves those purple
numbers. :-)

> I guess I am trying to focus on the linking and display capabilites
> before attempting the UI development. I can even envision some
> translators for others to view the data within the OHS again as HTML
> allowing browsing and re-publishing back to the Internet. I think this
> is important since not everyone will have the luxury of using an OHS
> system or XML editors.

We're definitely on the same page here.

-Eugene

-- 
+=== Eugene Eric Kim ===== eekim@eekim.com ===== http://www.eekim.com/ ===+
|       "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they        |
+=====  can have an excuse to drink alcohol."  --Steve Martin  ===========+



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