WEIBEL believes that there should be no procedural markup in the data at
all, that the data should be completely unsullied by information about
italics or boldness. That should be left up to the display device,
whether that display device is a page printer or a screen display device.
By keeping one's database free of that kind of contamination, one can
make decisions down the road, for example, reorganize the data in ways
that are not cramped by built-in notions of what should be italic and
what should be bold. WEIBEL strongly advocated descriptive markup. As
an example, he illustrated the index structure in the CORE data. With
subsequent illustrated examples of markup, WEIBEL acknowledged the common
complaint that SGML is hard to read in its native form, although markup
decreases considerably once one gets into the body. Without the markup,
however, one would not have the structure in the data. One can pass
markup through a LaTeX processor and convert it relatively easily to a
printed version of the document.
WEIBEL next illustrated an extremely cluttered screen dump of OCLC's
system, in order to show as much as possible the inherent capability on
the screen. (He noted parenthetically that he had become a supporter of
X-Windows as a result of the progress of the CORE Project.) WEIBEL also
illustrated the two major parts of the interface: l) a control box that
allows one to generate lists of items, which resembles a small table of
contents based on key words one wishes to search, and 2) a document
viewer, which is a separate process in and of itself. He demonstrated
how to follow links through the electronic database simply by selecting
the appropriate button and bringing them up. He also noted problems that
remain to be accommodated in the interface (e.g., as pointed out by LESK,
what happens when users do not click on the icon for the figure).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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