Re: Open Books and XML

[Jan Hlavacek <lahvak@math.ohio-state.edu>]

On Wed, Jul 21, 1999 at 07:14:48PM -0700, Robert Hopcroft wrote:
> Doug Loss wrote:
> 
> > It's intended for electronic book reading systems.  I don't know if
> > it handles hyperlinks, but I'm not sure if we want to do links in a
> > textbook anyway.  It occurs to me that if the intent of all this is
> > to make texts available for schools that may not be able to afford
> > them, making them useable primarily on the WWW may be wrong-headed.
> > If a school can't afford new texts, is it likely to be able to keep
> > enough computers internet connected for all the students to read our
> > texts on?  It's more likely (I think) that the texts will be printed
> > off the net and copied on paper for all the students in a class.

But the computers don't have to be internet connected.  The textbook can
be served locally, on an intranet.  The school can download it once, or
it can be sold on cheap CD like linux distributions. Plus the textbooks
can still be on the internet somewhere, so the students can connect to
them from home, or library, or wherever.

Of course it is still cheaper to give every student a printed copy of a
textbook than to give everybody a computer.  The school can also print
only parts of the textbook, and students can access the rest on the net
if they need to.  That's why the documents must be written in such a way
that they still make sense when printed, i.e. no "click here to see the
table of ..." and so on.

Also, if the book is available electronically, teachers can modify it.
That's one of the ideas of open source, isn't it?

> When one textbook requires background information belonging to another
> subject, I would do it with a link as opposed to having two instances
> of the same information. For example, if the computer science textbook
> required set theory then I would link to the set theory section of
> mathematics. To me this seems more straight forward and maintainable.
> Also I would keep the textbooks in downloadable digital format so that
> a school could simply download whatever they wanted and then serve it
> out to the students in whatever way they see fit.

There could be something like a package manager, so you could download
all or some of the textbooks referenced from the current textbook.  

-- 
Jan Hlav\'{a}\v{c}ek
lahvak@math.ohio-state.edu  (Blind Carbon Copies will bounce)
www: http://www.math.ohio-state.edu/~lahvak/