Renear, H. Allen. “Text Encoding”
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Renear, H. Allen. ???Text Encoding.???
Renear in his article ???Text Encoding??? (2004) providesvaluable insights about the historical and theoretical contextneeded to understand ???both contemporary text encoding practicesand the various ongoing debates that surround those practices.???He expounds on the theoretical frameworks that guided thedevelopment of markup related techniques and systems and theongoing debates that surrounded them. He pointed out thattraditional humanities computing was concerned mostly withliterature and language analysis but text encoding encompasses awider sense to include new cultural products like ???new media???.In presenting a brief history of markup languages he proceeds todelineate the advantages of the dominant type of markup model thathas been developed: the Descriptive markup.
However, even as Renear discusses the Descriptive model, he discusses how that model naturally fits with our view of text as an ???Ordered Hierarchy of Content Objects??? (OHCO); an intuitive view of text structure he challenges in his other article, ???Refining our Notion of What Text Really Is: The Problem of Overlapping Hierarchies"-- with various axiomatic arguments. Since markup languages grew as a modern system of annotating text for additional processing by machines, they were initially procedural since formatting commands and instructions were embedded inside the text. Descriptive Markup coincided with the birth of SGML and had the advantage of labeling parts of the document in a way authors could understand. Underlying this Descriptive Markup is the idea that markup should be focused on the structural aspects of the document and leave the visual presentation of that structure to the interpreter. The way Descriptive models work (identifying words, lines, passages, paragraphs, headings) naturally fits the way humans understand text. Descriptive Markup labels also function like assembler mnemonics (or macros), where abbreviations could be used to represent and decode longer strings, enabling the possibility of creating global variables that can affect some aspects of the document, without entirely affecting the whole document. Renear compared and contrasted the descriptive and procedural models giving credence and weight to the former.
While providing background detail of the creation of SGML, XMLand the TEI , Renear also took time to clarify confusingterminology in the field. SGML is not a markup language in thetraditional sense, but it actually is a meta-language: a languagethat provides all the basic elements for authors to build their ownmarkup languages. SGML provided a means by which other specific???grammars??? could be built for any range of documents. Reneardiscusses how SGML finds use beyond the formatting of documents--itcan also be useful for data interchange.
In the end Renear acknowledges how SGML???s adoption graduallysuffered, first in the publishing world when as WISYWIG Wordprograms appeared which provided an even richer visual metaphor fortext processing beyond macros and then second with the creation ofHTML. HTML, even though it lacked an initial Document TypeDefinition, and had, in the words of Renear, ???an impoverishedelement set???, was a much simpler and forgiving markup language.Curiously, HTML also included both descriptive and proceduralmarkup in its syntax ??? a mix of different text encodingapproaches. It is quite possible that the very structure ofWYSISWIG text processing with its visual metaphors and thenon-linear nature of hypertext in HTML challenged, for Renear, thedescriptive OHCO model of text structure. Renear argues that anewer encompassing theory of text structure is needed to bothunderstand and create new techniques for text encoding.
