XML Conversion

Thomas B. Passin tpassin at idsonline.com
Mon Nov 8 13:53:46 GMT 1999


From: <jess_nemis at inod.com>

>      Hello,
>
>      I'm a newbie in XML Conversion and we're being tasked to transform a
>      plain text file into XML.  We've done this in SGML before and learned
>      also that XML is actually Web-enabled SGML.  However, we noticed that
>      the extensive use of taggings (elements) in XML has slowed down our
>      productivity considerably.
>
>      Now my question is: is it really necessary to tag all items, say, in
a
>      bibliographic reference, e.g.
>
>       XML Specs now:
>
>        <cite><title>The Origin of Species</title>, <author>Darwin</author>
>        <pages>pp. 6-10</pages> <pubinfo><pub>Oxford University
Press</pub>,
>        <year>1901</year></pubinfo></cite>
>
>       SGML Specs before:
>
>       <cite>The origin of Species, Darwin, pp. 6-10, Oxford University
>       Press, 1901.</cite>
>
>       Links were provided to citerefs within the document.
>
>      What's the difference between the two, the rationale behind use of
>      extensive tags in XML, and when are decisions going to be made that
>      such data should or should not be tagged?
>

XML does not require any particular tags, any more the SGML did.  If you
only want to use the <cite> tag, don't use the others.  On the other hand,
some particular application or document design (DTD) may provide for more
tags because it wants to delineate more of the logical structure of the
document.  I don't know anything about the specific conversion software you
are using, but XML itself does not require any particular tags.  See if the
software will let you use only the tags you want, or look into using
something else.

Tom Passin
>      Thank you all for giving these some thoughts.



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