Free University Project

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Structured Markup Working Group

The Structured Markup working group (formerly LaTeX / SGML / DTD working group) is charged with charting the proper direction for structured formatting of texts and lecture notes to accompany all classes.

The vast majority of scientific, mathematical, and engineering texts are produced using some variation or superset of Donald Knuth's prescient TeX typesetting system, most likely Leslie Lamport's macro package LaTeX.

These tools excel at producing structured documents with very transparent user markup (ie not encumbered by onerous levels of keystrokes or required tags). Used in conjunction with either LaTeX2HTML or TeX4ht Macros, LaTeX documents can be translated into HTML-conformant pages. One of the primary difficulties with the current implementation is the necessity to render all mathematical inclusions as graphics, which results in loss of formatting quality as compared to TeX's native DVI format. Possible alternatives or additions that should be investigated include the new MathML web-based markup language proposed by the W3C and pushed heavily by the newer Mozilla builds.

Additionally, advances in SGML (Standardized General Markup Language) and its media-darling sibling XML (Extensible Markup Language) can also be considered in possible connection with existing TeX or LaTeX implementations. SGML or XML is used as the language to define a specific implementation of allowable markup in the form of a DTD (Document Type Defination). One of the more widely employed DTD's (currently in SGML, but transitioning to an XML implementation) is DocBook, created in 1991 as a joint project of HaL Computer Systems and O'Reilly, primarily to aid in exchange of troff-formatted UNIX documentation. It was widely influenced by Novell, Digital, and Sun during its formative years, before being transferred to the stewardship of the nonprofit Oasis Group in 1998. It is also worth noting that DocBook was initially used by the Linux Documentation Project before their transition to their own LinuxDoc DTD. The glaring difficulty, however, with all these DTD's is the complete exclusion of the necessary mathematical markup that would be absolutely required for many course materials. It will be interesting to see the combinations between DocBook, MathML, etc. and to what extent they are compatible with our needs.

We also should always keep in mind internationalization and locale issues so that the course materials can be meaningful to a world-wide audience, unencumbered by language issues. The W3C's Internationalization (I18N) / Localization (L10N) Committee as well as information on unicode should be consulted.

I think the goals of the members of the working should include familiarization with these formats as well as establishing and keeping a dialog between us and different appropriate technology groups so that we can figure out where we're going. I'm pretty certain that our initial implementation of all course materials (texts, lecture notes, etc.) will be in LaTeX format, subsequently batch-translated into a number of other open formats such as HTML for online browsing and Device Independent (DVI), PostScript (PS), and Portable Document Format (PDF) for downloading.

Current members:

Important references: