1. LIBS 7620 January 10, 2002

2. Electronic Text What is Electronic Text?

3. A new medium with its own developing or emerging regime of rules and standards for the creation, distribution, presentation, and storage of digital documents. It is, in part, define by its use of a markup language and increasingly defined by its ability to be searched.

4. What is E-text?… cont’d “structured information” that maximizes accessibility without sacrificing richness of expression A set of standards that attempt to rein in the uncontrolled development of competing technologies and proprietary languages and applications that threaten to splinter the Web

5. A Brief History of E-Text Early Electronic Text formats were more concerned with describing how things looked (ie. presentation) that with document structure or meaning. Troff and TEX, two early formatting languages, did a fantastic job of formatting printed documents, but lacked any sense of structure.

6. Set backs At this time, documents were essentially limited to being viewed on screen or printed out. Difficult to program for Very difficult to search or siphon information out of Impossible, as yet, to cross-reference electronically And virtually impossible to re-use or re-purpose documents for different applications

7. Generic Coding Generic coding began by using descriptive tags rather than formatting codes. First explored by the Graphics Communications Association (GCA). In the late 60s, the “GenCode” project developed new ways to encode different document types with generic tags and to assemble documents from multiple places.

8. Generalized Markup Language The next major advance was Generalized Markup Language (GML), a project by IBM. GML’s designers intended it as a solution to the problem of encoding documents for use with multiple subsystems. Documents formatted in this markup language could be edited, formatted, and searched by different programs because of its content-based tags.

9. SGML Inspired with the success of GML, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Committee on Information Processing assembled a team to develop a standard text-description language based on GML. The result was SGML which was quickly adopted by the U.S. Department of Defense and the US Internal Revenue Service.

10. SGML… cont’d The first meeting of the International SGML Users’ Group took place in the UK in 1985. Together with the GCA, the spread the gospel of SGML across Europe and N. America. The Electronic Manuscript Project (1986) of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) extends SGML into broader realms, fostering the use of SGML to encode general-purpose documents such as books and journals. Ultimately, SGML is ratified by the International Standards Organization (ISO 8879: 1986)

11. SGML… cont’d SGML was designed to be a flexible and all- encompassing coding scheme. It is basically a toolkit for developing specialized markup languages.

12. HTML The public revolution in generic codes came about in the early 90s, when Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) was developed by Tim Berners-Lee and Anders Berglund, employees of the European particle physics lab CERN. Berners-Lee and Berglund created an SGML document type for hypertext that was compact and efficient. It was easy to write software for and even easier to encode documents.

13. The HTML Explosion When HTML went public, it exploded and has only recently begun to show signs of slowing down. However, HTML was in some ways a step backward from SGML. To achieve the simplicity necessary to be truly useful, some principles of generic encoding had to be sacrificed.

14. HTML and beyond… Nonetheless, HTML was a brilliant step forward for the Internet and a giant leap for markup languages, because it got the world interested in electronic documentation and linking. To return to the ideals of generic coding, some people tried to adapt SGML for the web, but SGML proved too big to squeeze into a little web browser.

15. XML A smaller language that retained the generality of SGML was required, and thus was born the Extensible Markup Language (XML). XML is now rapidly becoming a standard protocol for continuing and managing information. XML is really a family of technologies that can do everything from formatting documents to filtering data. And, on the highest level, it is a philosophy for information handling that seeks to maximize accessibility and usefulness for data by refining it down to its most basic, structured form.

16. Step Back: Examples For example, HTML requires that one document type be used for all purposes, forcing people to overload tags rather than define specific-purpose tags. Second, many of the tags are purely presentational and are so embedded with presentational tags that they cannot be easily reincorporated in other applications.

17. PDF and E-books Other proprietary forms of electronic text, particularly Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) and numerous companies’ variations on the ‘e-book’, are themselves competing markup languages that mimic in one form or another the functionality of generic coding languages. They too are forms of electronic text, but e- text with a price tag. Still, the flexibility and ease of use offered by PDF and e-books has made them highly attractive to business and the greater public.

18. Any Questions?