Richard, hello.
On 26 Aug 2018, at 13:01, Richard Parsons wrote:
SGML is sounding more and more like something I
should know about given my project. A quick google has turned up the
hashtag #makesgmlgreatagain ?! If anyone has any suggestions where to
start
my research, then that would be welcome
I'll reply on-list to stress that it really wasn't my intention to
suggest you develop an active interest in SGML, an interest in which
can, I think, now be regarded as even more retro than Facebook. SGML
was^Wis a wonderful thing (it and its associated technologies was the
first genuinely interesting computing domain I was aware of), but I
suspect that ship has now sailed, unless you're in one of the industries
that has invested decades of effort in SGML-based systems.
SGML addressed a lot of problems -- structured markup, archival formats,
overlaying semantics by aspect
/annotation -- but these having been rediscovered as problems, now have
more fashionable solutions.
On the more general point:
On the other hand, I don't want to create lots of separate systems
(contact
management, calendar systems etc) which then have to be kept in sync
with
my notes. It's too easy to forget and for them to fall out of sync.
You might be interested in looking at the Semantic Web, and RESTful
interfaces, if you're not aware of them already. They're very different
things (and the former is not easy to get into), but both are motivated
by the idea that the online world is now a interacting world of loosely
coupled systems, each with their own semantics. The semantic web says
that the world is a highly heterogeneous database; the REST paradigm
claims that if you conceptualise remote gobbets of information as named
things, then this is a useful way to integrate heterogeneity. If you
were to wrap a contacts management system in a RESTful interface which
exposed adequately-described and machine-processable named contacts,
that becomes a good starting point for integration down the line.
Or at least that's what I'd start with, if given free rein with your
problem, and no deadlines.
If there is already software for embedding business information into
documents then I would certainly be interested.
'Embedding into documents...': now _that_ makes me think of Project
Xanadu, which is even further back down the line! Do not go to Xanadu;
noone comes back from Xanadu.
Best wishes,
Norman
--
Norman Gray : https://nxg.me.uk
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