Is anybody working on ...

[Cynthia Lenora Shern]

Is anybody working on creating an abstration for preserving formatting
information inside or along with SGML documents, in cases where format
really is part_of the information. Two examples where such an approach
might make sense could be:

	Examples: 
		1)	K-12 textbooks
		2)	Printed survey forms for large market research firms.

	In example 1, there's a pedagogical relationship between text and
illustrations. 
	It occurs to me
	that a relationship this critical to the purpose of the information
certainly isn't 
	throw_away.

	In example 2, there's a value in preserving both
	page fidelity and page integrity if information is moved from one digital
format to another,
	so that inconsistent or erroneous data isn't collected. (What I'm trying
to say here is that
	if they move to SGML, questions on a page can't move undeterminately as it
will throw 	questions
	in to the reliability of the data collected.)

	In examples 1 and 2 above, in fact format is part_of the knowledge one
would want to
	capture about the content.

I wonder if perhaps there's a place for a level of abstraction, SGML
expressed, that is about_format although not necessarily processor
specific. It occurs to me (although I must plead a very slender thread of
evidence in this regard), that Hytime syntax would lend itself to modelling
such abstractions.

Since some of Hytime is included in the XML set of specifications, I think
this mailing list is a good place to post this question.




Cynthia Shern
Product Specialist
Arbortext, Inc.
1000 Victors Way, Suite 100
Ann Arbor, MI 48108
(734) 997-0200

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