Scholarly markup in XML's second decade

XML is now ten years old. (For those interested in an insider's view of how that all happened, Tim Bray has republished XML People.) For scholarly projects involving semantically structured texts, it is practically a given that they will rely on XML.

But in actual practice, texts produced by current projects often don't look very different from scholarship based on SGML in the 1980s. In the next postings on this blog, I want to discuss three suggestions based on my experience with XML over the last decade, and how it contrasts with my experience of SGML in the preceding decade. In each case, I'll focus on how to follow these suggestions using the Text Encoding Initiative's guidelines.

1. Separation of concerns applies to document content, too. (Now here.)


2. Citation schemes: empty content elements considered harmful (Now here.


3. What's the diff? Rethinking the critical apparatus.

Stay tuned.