Moving to XML: Latin texts XML conversion project at the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities

Abstract

The delivery of documents on the Web has moved beyond the restrictions of the traditional Web markup language, HTML. HTML’s static tags cannot deal with the variety of data formats now beginning to be exchanged between various entities, whether corporate or institutional. XML solves many of the problems by allowing arbitrary tags, which describe the content for a particular audience or group. At the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities the Latin texts of Lector Longinquus are being transformed to XML in readiness for the expected new standard. To allow existing browsers to render these texts, a Java program is used to transform the XML to HTML on the fly.