Minutes of the TEI Presentation Tools SIG Meeting in Nancy, 08 November 2003

There was great interest in the Presentation Tools SIG in Nancy. Most of the meeting was spent discussing whether we were one SIG or more than one. Some at the meeting were interested in TEI as an authoring tool (that is, a markup language for creating new documents such as reports and websites, as opposed to marking up transcribed documents, such as manuscripts, plays, novels, etc.) and others were interested in TEI querying and delivery. Therefore, we split into two SIGs. If you are interested in TEI as an authoring tool you can check out the TEI Authoring SIG

From the meeting in Nancy we discovered that many of us in the TEI are in the same situation. We have a large body of TEI-encoded documents and we would like to delivery these to end users, typically over the web. We also agreed that this is not an easy task. The features we would like in our web publication systems are:
  • the ability to perform XML aware queries on a large number of TEI-encoded documents
  • to deliver these documents to the end user as HTML (on the fly?)
Item 2 is not as difficult as item 1 since XSLT has become a stable and robust way to transform XML to HTML. However, there are many choices as far as XSLT processors and web applications to perform the transformations.
Since so many TEI users are tackling the same issues, we thought it made sense to share our knowledge and experience. To that end we would like to use this mailing list and web space as:
  • an area to which TEI members, subscribers, and users can come when they want to answer the question "After it's all in XML, what then?
  • a resource for information on the different XML processing technologies
  • a place for users to share experience with these technologies so we are not all starting from scratch and "rolling our own"
  • a place where members can provide links to their own XML applications if they wish to share them

The consensus in Nancy was an interest in web delivery tools, but this does not mean that the SIG will be limited only to this. It is open to any discussion on processing and presenting XML.