XML-Free Digital Editions

Playing around with Apache's CouchDB today I realised that it uses JSON, not XML to handle exchanges between client and server. This opens the intriguing possibility of making XML-free digital editions. If the standoff properties for digital texts were also stored using JSON or YAML rather than XML - a simple enough change - then the entire edition could be XML-free. The only thing that comes close is the final conversion into HTML for the browser. But this can be in good old HTML (an SGML dialect) rather than XHTML, an XML dialect. I doubt that anyone has achieved that before, depending on how you define a 'Digital Edition'. By that term I mean an online digital archive of marked up texts accessible over the web. I think this is rather a liberating idea that is actually inevitable. If we believe the XML afficionados disaster will ensue as soon as we abandon 'standards'. Actually what will happen is that digital editions will blossom with the possibilities offered by the new form of digital text. It's time to show people what is possible without XML.

Formatter tool with full overlap

More progress, I'm afraid. I've incorporated the test program announced in the last post into the formatter tool. This is intended as a practical replacement for XSLT. So now I can convert real texts plus overlapping standoff properties into valid HTML. If the properties are derived from XML documents there won't be any overlap initially. What formatter does is loosen up that particular restriction. So in the GUI it will be possible to change properties or add new ones that overlap. And it will still format correctly. I'll be putting some test cases onto the testbed at Loyola soon.

Web pages from overlapping properties

I've made some progress in turning random overlapping properties into HTML. I've written a test program to both demonstrate the principle and also to serve as a debugging tool for me. In the latter role it hasn't reported a single error for two days, so I'm starting to think this is it. Although it doesn't do anything useful it shows that neither embedded markup nor tree structures are necessary to markup up a text.