All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

SGML

TorgoX on 2003-12-29T20:38:27

Dear Log,

As a scholar of ancient and eldritch languages, it occurs to me that at some point, I should translate the SGML Handbook into English, from whatever crazy Calculese it's currently in. I've seen PostScript errors that were easier to read than this SGML book is.

Let's make SGML an asterisk language

jjohn on 2003-12-29T21:59:21

If I understand aright, you wacky etymologists often construct a word that must of been the root for words we have today, despite the fact the no one can find written evidence of this progenitor. These words are called 'asterisk words' because they are prepended with an asterisk to denote that the word is really just a guess. To make this more concrete, Tom Shippey suggests that the origin of the word 'hobbit' is *hol-bytla, which means "hole dweller" in some dead language.

In this spirit I suggest that we all try to forget that SGML and DTDs ever existed and pretend that HTML and XML were delivered to us on stone tablets. Otherwise, people might try to continue using SGML to do awful things.

Re:Let's make SGML an asterisk language

TorgoX on 2003-12-30T21:05:51

That's crazy talk! I like it.