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XML for Ancients
Andrew writes: "More than 5,000 years ago, the very first information revolution occurred when some unknown research team in Mesopotamia found a way to download and store language through a killer application called "writing.". The cuneiform digital library will have 60,000 texts ready in a couple of years. Using SVG and XML to represent their documents. Similar efforts are underway for hieroglyphics."
I have been working in IT since 1997, yeah I know a mere blink of an eye for some Unix Wizards (ie. beards, strange clothing and their own arcane language). What I have noticed is that every year my handwriting has been getting progressively worse. What with my PDA, laptop, PCs etc. I just have no need to wield a pen no more :)
Apart from signing my name on credit card chits, the only time I am required to write is for birthday/Christmas and other assorted cards. Its getting so bad now that I start to write a long word and just give up. My once pristine handwriting now looks like a doctors prescription scrawl.
Any else get this too?
Po
How Snowcrash.
they are also writing their tcp packets on clay tablets, and attempting to send them down the wire. That was the quickest /.'ing I've *ever* seen.
[smile]
Scientific American has this article on Information Technology, 2500 B.C. on what life was like for the information worker of that day.
As many as half a million cuneiform tablets, hand size up to book-page size, are now available around the world. Surely many more are waiting to be found. Those samples are of every quality: once prized accounts and receipts, schoolboys' lessons, litigation profound or droll, literary essays, erotica, mathematics--and entire ancient epics, centuries older than Father Abraham's. A mostly unread treasury, comprising the equivalent of tens of thousands of large printed volumes.
Looks like there could be a lot of fun and good stuff there.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
-- William "Scorpion King" Gates
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
Unicode is often referred to as a 16-bit system, which would allow for only 65,536 characters, but by reserving some code points for mapping into additional 16-bit planes, it has the potential to cope with over one million unique characters.
The current version (3.1) of the Unicode Standard, developed by the Unicode Consortium, assigns a unique identifier to each of 94,140 characters
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
IIRC, cuneiform writing is composed entirely of angle brackets. To write this in XML, every character is going to have to be escaped!
"justified.dtd" >
The cuneiforms are justified and ancient.
and well formed.
XML is gonna rock you.
All I can think of now is the new book series:
"XML for Mummies"
At least in this case when you see the reviews "this book will put you to sleep" it really doesn't matter.
-Brad