SGML for Web Pages

[Tony Barry]

At 20:53 95/12/19, Heinrich C. Kuhn wrote:
>And we will have to rely on ink on stable paper
>for a *very* long time yet. The only sensible
>solution, that I can think about for longterm
>archiving "electronic" documents is having a
>paper printout of all the documents in a small
>number (e.g. one or two on every continent)
>of archiving libraries.

You cant print dynamic documents and you can't sensibly try and print
douments built into a hypertext matrix and hope to make sense of them.

Paper may last a few generations but is expensive to copy and loses
information every time you do.  Digital information must be copies much
more frequently but at almost no expense and it is accurate.  My material
for instance would have a set of about 50 rolling backups and I know that
the better material of my collegues is mirrored in many sites across the
world.

I would suggest that that the future of the preservation of paper is in
digitisation not in paper or microform (remember that?) copies.

>
>> The digital revolution requires some superhuman intervention
>> on someone's part to capture information for posterity.

So did paper.  Society figured out that the institution to provide the
cultural memory for  mankind's paper records would be the library.  This
works as books are artifacts.  We have made a mess of audio and video
records. Digital information works in a different way and we need some more
superhuman intervention to find social models which will preserve this
information.  Libraries may be they way to go.  They may not.

>I admit that it is not too improbable, that interpreting
>GIF- and JPEG-encoded graphics will be a problem after
>a quarter of a century,

Not so.  Formats with open standards will have no problem with
interpretation.  Its proprietry standards which are not public which might
die.

>but I see no such problems with
>HTML, as HTML is basically ASCII and ASCII will be readable
>for a long time to come probably.

HTML just uses _readable_ ascii.  Just because a binary object might use
ASCII which does not map directly to printable characters makes no
difference in its ability to be interpreted.

Tony


__________________________________________________________________________
Tony Barry                  URL:http://snazzy.anu.edu.au/People/TonyB.html
Centre for Networked Information and Publishing & also
Centre for Networked Access to Scholarly Information  fone  +61 6 249 4632
Australian National University Library                phax  +61 6 279 8120
Canberra  A.C.T. 0200, AUSTRALIA                      tony at info.anu.edu.au