Cave-Surveying digest, Vol 1 #23 - 4 msgs

[Garry Petrie]

 > On Thu, 11 Jan 2001, Julian Todd wrote:

 > > [...]
 > > This text (in the CDATA[]), being a faithful representation of your notes
 > > from the cave, will not change unless there has been a transcription
 > > error or other blunder.  After you have run your Survex parser and
 > > extracted the data into XML notation you could delete it and
 > > carry on without it.

 >  Keeping a clean unmodified original text, and letting programs produce
 >  the result of the parse, instead of trying to mark up the original line
 >  with what it was identified with was a great help when it came to things
 >  like proofreading back in my LBCC days.  It also meant that errant programs
 >  were more likely to add their mangled markup in the stuff they dealt with
 >  than they were to mangle the lines of the original.
 >  (Of course, back then the idea of storing an image of the page was totally
 >   out of the question.)

I can not imagine anything more absurd to do, transcribe your survey notes, run it through 
a filter to produce XML and then include the original source in the results. What would 
you do if you had more notes to transcribe? Is not your primitive text editor just a step 
of your "surveying software solution?" People say XML is good because it is human 
readable. That is bunk, those bits on your hard disk are not human readable.

The only true record is your original survey notes, don't misplace them. I do trust 
technology enough to preserve digital images. Scan your notes and place the files on a CD 
not stored at your house. That's what I do. Enough said, box off.

Back to XML. I gather that XPointers are a way to reference files. Our markup language 
needs a way to reference external files, e.g. images.

Garry Petrie