On Sun, May 19, 2002 at 11:47:39AM -0400, Ross Scaife wrote:

> and generous to neophytes), the same folks mostly have very little
> tolerance for discussion of new tools for doing the work.  One sees
> quite a lot of that.

I am sorry, but I disagree very strongly. I do not see posts
to this list, from me or any one else, which show a lack
of tolerance for new tools.

Charles sent a helpful message about the new Oxy editor, and
I replied suggesting that it was still a geek editor, and not
a very sophisticated one at that. I don't see any intolerance there.
I, like everyone else I can think of, is eager to see new
software and try it out with TEI stuff.

> Though I do understand that building (and even assessing) modern
> authoring tools suitable for work on documents marked in tei-conformant
> ways is no trivial matter, still it does seem clear that until such

there are loads of modern XML authoring tools out there. we've
never had it so good!

> tools exist, not only will development of the encoding standard continue
> to be in the hands of a vanishingly small group of insiders, but so for
> the most part will its implementation.

what about the millions of people beavering away writing XML
around the globe, be it in EAD, Docbook, XHTML, TEI or whatever?
I just don't see the argument that lack of tools is holding
up the creation of TEI texts - the existence of Word and HTML
probably has much more to do with it.


> Will Emacs - however wonderful
> once you get inside of it, and it really is amazing! - ever be widely
> used by authors?

I put it to you that its been very widely used by
authors for the last 20 years.....

All these arguments are very familiar to me from the TeX community,
where there has always been a lot of people saying "why don't we
have decent authoring tools". Nevertheless, many many thousands
of ordinary folk write LaTeX documents each week, many of which
are as complex as, or more complex than, most TEI stuff.

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