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Book DTD's I

This page dicusses the role of DTD's in marking up an historic document. It does not go into the specifics of page authoring. All documents that are marked up for Project Gutenberg must be marked up according to a DTD, and then validated against that DTD. Here are a list of the DTD's available at present.

XHTML. Marking up using XHTML is discussed in these pages. If you use XHTML use the recommended classes so that the document can be given semantic meaning.
gutpoems1.dtd. This DTD was initially designed for marking up the poetry of Robert Burns. It can be extended to other poets. A descrition of this DTD is given here.In order to use this dtd a copy of the 'poemfrag' dtd must be in the same folder.
gutbook1.dtd. This DTD was initially designed for marking up the books of Charles Darwin. It can be extended to other books. A narative descrition of this DTD starts here. In order to use this dtd a copy of the 'bookfrag' dtd must be in the same folder.
gutplay1.dtd. This DTD was initially designed for marking up Goldsmith's "She Stoops to Conquer", but should be suitable for both prose and verse plays including Shakespeare. No narrative descrition of this DTD is available at present, but it has the same general structure as the other DTD's .In order to use this dtd a copy of the 'playfrag' dtd must be in the same folder.
gutbkplay1.dtd.This DTD is an extension of the gutbook DTD, and was designed for use when the book contained a fragment of a play. .In order to use this dtd a copy of the 'bookplay' dtd must be in the same folder.
gutbkplaypg1.dtd.This DTD is an extension of the gutbkplay1 DTD, and was designed for use when the book page numbers and it was desired to keep these in the text. In order to use this dtd a copy of the 'bkplaypg' dtd must be in the same folder.
teixlite.dtd.This DTD is an XML version ov the TEIlite DTD. It is included for those familiar with this Book DTD. We have just finished some elementary documentation on this DTD. It should be noted that the SGML version of this DTD is used in the academic world for most markups, but the markup tags are quite terse, and the element grouping is far from intuitive. There is a series of tutorials available teidtds1.html for those who wish to use this DTD.

The Importance of DTD's

DTD's or schemas are a description of the way a document is marked up, and contains such information as the permitted elements and attributes, the permitted content model of an element, and the attribute types. They are particularly important in marking up historic documents, as they let any future reviewer of the document know what they can expect. They are also important in preventing anarchy. If it wasn't for a DTD or Schema the marker would be free to mark up the document in any way they wanted. Although this may be fun for the marker, it would not be fun for someone who had to review the document at a later date.

DTD's and Schemas can be used to impose an order on a document, and this is exactly what we want to do at the top level of the document, where we want to make sure all the markup blurbs and e-text blurbs are included. When we come to the historic document proper we need a much looser state of affairs. The book or poem is written, and we just want to make sure we have a DTD that describes the content!

We will not teach you about the specifics of DTD's here. There are several good tutorials and books available, and also the guild has an XML class. There are narrative descriptions of the various DTD's in the next few pages.

DTD Policy

All the DTD's used must be free to use in perpetuity. (Note this is applies to several well known DTD's including DocBook). We will maintain a series of suitable DTD's on this site. These DTD's will evolve, and hopefully improve over time, but all old versions will be maintained. We intend to follow these general principles.

Major versions will be offered no more frequently than every 6 months
New versions should be backwardly compatible with old versions. Eg documents written to gutA V="1.*" DTD's will still show in gutA V="2.*" DTD's
If this is not possible, a new DTD name will be supplied
A list of issues will be maintained for each DTD, and these issues will be discussed on the HWG mailing lists.
All gut dtd's should have the same top level structure.

The top level 'gutdoc' DTD

All 'gut' DTD's should all have the same top level structure. This structure is shown in the following diagram.

The following shows "pseudo code" that explains the heirachy and the nature of the content of each section.

<gutdoc>
 <gutblurb>
    [This contains all the meta information about the 
    document that was developed by the original transcriber. 
    It will probably not be displayed by the style sheet.]
 </gutblurb>
 <markupblurb>
   [This section contains the information about the marker 
   of the document, including all details of the revision history. 
   It will probably not be displayed by the style sheet.]
 </markupblurb>
 <gutcredit>
    [This short credit is designed to be displayed 
    at the top of the document. eg. ]
    This document was marked up by [name], a member of 
    the HTML writers guild as part of Project Gutenberg.[date]. 
    The original transcription was made by [name] date. 
    For further information go to view/source.
 </gutcredit>
 <gutbook>
  
   The document proper goes here. The DTD for this will vary.
 </gutbook>
 <endmarkupblurb>
    [Typically this will contain and notes made by the 
     marker pertaining to the document it self, including 
    foot notes. It will probably not be displayed by 
    the style sheet.
 </endmarkupblurb>
 <endgutblurb>
    Most e-texts have a line or two of additional 
    meta information.
 </endgutblurb>
</gutdoc>

Each of the non document top levels should have the same top level structure namely:- (#PCDATA|para|subsect|title)*

Selecting a DTD