Re: Authoring versus Interchange

On Wed, Dec 2, 2015 at 1:29 AM, Florian Rivoal <florian@rivoal.net> wrote:

>
> > On 01 Dec 2015, at 23:02, Johannes Wilm <johanneswilm@vivliostyle.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Hey,
> > as someone who has worked on one of the academic authoring tools out
> there for a while (Fidus Writer), for a long time I had a hard time
> understanding what the difference between interchange and editing format is.
>
> I think the differences come when you consider manual editing of the
> source document, rather than its editing via some authoring tool. Things
> that are cumbersome to do or read by hand may make it easier for software
> to work with the data, and vice versa.
>
>
Could you think of an example of when this would happen? If you write the
document by hand, and it needs to be written with the level of specificity
as what is later needed for interchange, wouldn't you need to write it as
complex as well?

Some of the markup will have to be somewhat complex -- for example
citations that have both text before and after them and that need to be
able to specify something else than pages as reference. Every few months
someone seems to try to invent a new dialect of markdown for academics to
get away from the difficulty of writing latex, but once they run into
citations they end up either not being able to support most of the required
features or defining something that is as complex as latex. So users who
choose to write it by hand will have to look the variable names up when
using them.

In practice, the citation would today maybe be represented by something
like:

<span class="citation" reference="mauss54" before="See for example"
reference-counter="paragraph" counter="5428">(See for example Mauss 1954:
paragraph 5428)</span>.

That may be too difficult for some to just memorize, but I can't really see
how else you are going to do it.