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\title{Questions and Answers}
\author{compiled by Jonathan Fine}
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The last session of the Bridewell meeting was a panel comprising 
the speakers David Barron \[DB] and Martin Key \[MK], joined by Lou
Burnard \[LB] (Oxford, Text Encoding Initiative) and David Evans \[DE]
(part of David Brailsford's group in Nottingham).  The session was
chaired by David Penfold \[DP] from the co-sponsors, the
BCS Electronic Publishing Special Group.

(I have prepared this report from a not always audible tape
recording.  Remarks have been edited.  I hope I have not introduced
any error or misrepresentation.  Questions have been set in
italics.---Jonathan Fine)

\question What solutions are there going from one encoding method to
another, say from Microsoft to \LaTeX?

\[LB] I recommend via SGML as internal format.  The public domain tool
Rainbow Makers has an interesting approach.  It takes a document
marked up with formatting codes, and turns those codes into SGML
tags.  So you do get terrible things such as tags for font and
type-size, but now they are represented using the SGML format.
Translating from that to real SGML is a lot easier.

\[DP]  {\em Word-for-Word\/} has been well used in the publishing
industry for years.  It converts between stacks of mainly
word-processor (but also Frame for example) formats. I expect they
will eventually get round to SGML.

\[Malcolm Clark]
\question
If all I'm interested in is portable documents, in other words
shifting a document from one site to another electronically, why
don't I just standardise on Microsoft Word?  It's not high enough
quality for publishing, but for 90\% of what I do, memos and stuff like
that,  I do it in Word and attach it to the electronic mail message I 
am sending.  The recipient at a Windows or Macintosh unbundles it and
they've got it in the same format I created it in.  It's solved all
the problems.

\[LB]  Because then you can only talk to people who've done the same
thing.

\[MK]  Several answers.  As a company, Elsevier wishes to retain
the material they produce for some considerable time.  We still sell
material that is 10 or 20 years old.  Microsoft Word as a format is
fine for sending it off today, but in 10 years time, who knows?  It
probably won't be compatible with anything.  So retaining it in that
format is no use.  We have to convert it into something we can do
things with.  Secondly, there are limitations with what you can do
with a Word document.  Such as how you can search text, specifying
where the author's name is, etc.  SGML allows us to structure
the complete document properly.

\[DB]  There is a distinction between portability for immediate
delivery and portability for archiving (see his article).  Also,
Warwick University (MC's location) must be different from
Southampton, where no such uniformity exists.  For example computer
scientists use \TeX.  The problem is like herding sheep to get them
to move in the same direction.

\[Allan Reese]  Word is not a standard, it's a mess. At our site we
have different versions of Word on different platforms, and they have
different and incompatible document formats.  The lowest common
denominator of portability is to have the text transmitted from one
place to another.  With the Internet this is generally not possible. 
As soon as you are using a particular character set lying outside
ASCII you are lost.  One example is a text file (produced by a
software company) which was transferred from Mac Word to Win Word
without being checked carefully.  The left quote character had come
out as a `O' slash.  These funny things happen. Another example is
from Spain, sent to a news group.  The sender has the character `\~n'
on his keyboard.  He presses this key and it comes out as `\~n'
on the screen.  He sends it to me and it comes out as `\$'.
He can't even send the word `Espa\~nol' to the Spanish language news
group!  Transmission of text is a big problem which a lot of users
haven't yet tackled.  In academic publishing one will have to deal
with multiple character sets, if only to be to accomodate authors'
names.

\[Jonathan Fine]
\question
Two related questions.  Firstly, where will we be in the year 2000?
If we have a meeting here in five years time, what will have
happened?  Secondly, if SGML succeeds, what will fail?

\[LB] In five years time people will talking about Microsoft in rather
the same way we talk about IBM.  Remember IBM, they used to make
computers.  What will fail will be the forces of the evil empire. 
Namely the idea that it is perfectly legal and correct
for any software company or equipment vendor to take information away
from the people who have created it and lock it up in a proprietary
format.  That is an idea that I really would like to see the end of.
(Others expressed doubt at the early demise of Microsoft.)

\[MK]  As a publisher, still dependent on paper.  Five years is not
very long.  Unless an electronic product appears that is really user
friendly to read for any length of time, we will still want paper.
There will be more electronic products, particularly on CD-ROM.  In
our environment a lot of specific document formats will probably
fail.  Ventura Publisher for example. People will concentrate
on just three or four products eventually.  \LaTeX\ and \TeX\ will
still be around, and a few word processors.

\[Sebastian Rahtz]
\question
A slightly heretical question about maths and chemistry.   A lot of
effort has gone into providing DTDs for these things.  Perhaps these
will just wither and die.  In five years time perhaps we will stop
pretending that math is structured and regard it in the same way as
we regard graphics?  Would any one like to defend the SGML markup of
maths?

\[MK]  The only reason it is useful, is that it is independent of
fonts.  With \LaTeX\ you are still dependent on the font.  When we
combine different articles into a book, we want a uniform appearance.
We don't want a mixture of fonts, otherwise we're back to the
horrible camera ready copy.  As for the fact that SGML maths is
structured, I wouldn't particularly want to defend it.

There was quite some discussion of this from the floor, which the
tape recorder did not clearly pick up.

\[Dina Desai]
\question
We would like to use SGML markup for our maths.  What would you
suggest?  

\[DB]  Do you mean what DTD, or what software, or both?  {\em What
DTD?}

(Some information given by Mike Popham about specific math
DTDs.)

\[Gerard van Nes]
The whole problem with maths and SGML is that we simply need an SGML
editing program which is able to display as we write such
complicated formulae.  It is of course very uncomfortable to write
the huge amount of mark-up as one needs for SGML maths.  But if you
have a really good SGML editor it's no problem at all.

\[DB]  I would have for maths a single tag, which says \verb"&lt;maths&gt;"
with an attribute which is notation, whose values will obviously be
\verb"tex", \verb"eqn", etc.   If you know it's \verb"eqn" or
whatever, it is searchable.  You can put hyperlinks into it.

\question
About DTDs.  About compound documents really.  Say someone wants a
journal with a video snip of the author explaining the article, a sound
bite, or what have you.  Where would one get a DTD for this?

\[DB]  Much the same as the maths.  A tag that says \verb"&lt;sound&gt;" and
an attribute which says which encoding scheme you are using.

\[LB]  There is an application of SGML called HyTime which is (about
to become?) an ISO Standard.  It defines time-based media of all
kinds and also different architectures within which you can associate
events happening in time.  There is one product that can function
against HyTime specifications, it is something to watch out for. 
There is in the TEI Guidelines a simplified version of some HyTime
concepts.

\[DB]  In the latest issue of EPodd there is a paper with the title
{\em Why Use HyTime?}

\[Angus Duggan]
\question
Adobe put a lot of effort into Acrobat as a static encapsulation
format, able to reproduce the exact form of documents.  Will this in
the future be important, or will content be all?  Will the first
published form of the document be important?

\[DE]  For archival purposes things like Acrobat are very useful,
because they can encapsulate exactly how a document looked.  For
other things, such as database access and searching it is the content
which is more important.  So you might want two different electronic
forms of the document.  Also, the printed and on-screen versions of
the document might be formatted differently.

\[Angus Duggan]
\question
If we want to represent content and we do want keep the original form
it was published in, then obviously Acrobat solves the one problem
and SGML the other.  What thoughts about document formats which
maintain both equally as well?

\[LB]  I'd like to question one of your premises.  You talk about the
orginal form of the document.  I think we're going to forget what that
is very soon.  I don't know what the original form of the TEI
guidelines as published is.  It was produced as an SGML document. At
home it is white letters on a black background.  In the office black
on a white.  In yellow on green when I was in Chicago.  This was the
authoring.  Similar remarks apply to the printing, on US and UK sized
paper.  We had to do some fiddling around with the page numbers, as
you can imagine.  There is another version of the guidelines which is
equally authorative and has exactly the same content, and that exists
on a DynaText screen.  It has no page numbers at all.  I'm trying to
make the point that I don't know which is the original form.  They're
all equally valid.  

\[MK]  When authors have their references in the article they often
refer to an article in a book by its page number.  How on earth will
you make a reference to a location in an electronic document which
does not have page numbers?

\[LB]  By referring to the logical organisation of the text. 
Paragraph~38 within division~3 of etc.

\[MK]  I'm sure that we will eventually have a combined product which
will have the format and all the structure in it from the SGML.  All
in one product.  Because there's so much more  you can do with
that than you can with just PDF.  The problem, as David Brailsford
mentioned this morning, is the Brand-X between the SGML and the PDF. 
Until we can resolve that problem we can get to PDF, but not via the
generic route, which is what we as publishers want.

\[Allan Reese]
About chasing up a reference.  Page numbers are
physical objects, and when the document changes the physical indexing
is out of date.  With electronic documents you will go just by
keyword and content indexing.  You won't have to know where it is. 
You just say I want the paper by Fred Smith or whoever.  

\[MK]  That works when you are searching an electronic product from
another electronic product.  It won't work from a paper to an
electronic product.  

\[Angus Duggan]
Intermediate version of documents.  If people are
publishing on the Internet, if you put a content link in a document to
a document being revised, this may change or break the link.  So you
need to have links to particular versions of particular documents.  

\[David Coton]
Chapters and verses are a menace.  We are looking at how to regard
text in an object-oriented way.  One big probelm with such a scheme
is that Bible text has two hierarchical structures.  It has chapter -
verse structure, and it has section - paragraph - sentence structure. 
Both are useful, both are valid.  Both are in different circumstances
necessary.  But the two do not coincide.  Any object-oriented system
has difficulty with that.  There are ways round it.  We are looking
at introducing small enough units of text to give coincident
boundaries.  SGML also has a problem with this.  I'm told that the
standard allows for dual hierarchies.  However, none of the existing
tools implement it.  

\[DB]  There is only one product I've seen that supports this CONCUR
feature, which is the Mark-it parser, which is quite old.  This
problem is discussed in the TEI guidelines.  I don't think this is an
SGML problem.  It is a characteristic of textual materials that they
can be organised in many different ways.  This is inherent in the
nature of text.

\[Jonathan Fine]
\question
I'm not sure I should be asking this question.  What future for
typography?

\[MK]  If you believe the formatted original will continue, not
replaced by a large amorphous glob of text,  there still is a case
for typography.  It is very important to read something, to
understand how it's put together.  Reading off a screen is difficult
anyway.  Typography is purely there to allow you to read something
easily and quickly.  I can't see any reason why it should disappear. 
Especially as I still believe paper will be around for a while.

\[LB]  I think that typography is hard, hard, difficult and very
important. There are so many people clamouring in the Web and other
electronic marketplaces, that anything that stands out will be
enormously important.  One of the skills conspicuously missing on the
Web is good typographic understanding.  The skills needed to present
stuff effectively and well in the electronic medium are really an
outgrowth from the skills the typographers have developed in the
past.

\[DP]  Typography is one aspect, but information design is perhaps an
even more important.  We've hardly covered information design.  If
more and more people are putting things on the Web and not thinking
about how they design the document, then the morass of information
overload is going to get worse and worse.

\[DB]  If you go to \verb"www.whitehouse.gov" you'll find that it has
been done by a professional graphics designer.  That really makes it
stand out on the Web.

\[Mary Dyson]  Can I add to that?  Typography on the screen.  Have we
got it well sussed?  I don't think we have yet.  To go back to the
old chestnut, it's not necessarily just transferring the same
principles.  Italics are not terribly good for emphasis on screen. So
you want perceptual equivalents of legibility.  

\[DP]  We've come to a good point to stop.  One final thing.  The Web
assumes one model of access to information.  There are many others,
such as browsing, which are virtually impossible on the Web.  Maybe we
should be thinking about how other forms of access to information are
possible.  Can I thank the four people on the panel and everyone
else, particularly the speakers.

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