Standoff properties as an alternative to XML for digital historical editions

In the past few years digital humanists have recognised that the development of tools for the collaborative creation of shareable, reusable and archivable transcriptions of historical documents is being held back by the complexity and lack of interoperability of customisable XML encoding standards. To fix this problem transcriptions must be split into their constituent parts: a plain text and individual sets of markup. The plain text is easily processable by text-analysis software or search engines, and may be divided into layers representing different states of each document. Each markup set may also represent a separate layer of information to enrich an underlying plain text, and may be freely combined with others. Unlike in XML, textual properties in markup sets can freely overlap. Plain text versions and their corresponding markup can also be reliably and efficiently converted into HTML, the language of the Web. Unlike previous attempts at separating markup from text, the proposed data representation is designed to be fully editable, and development of a suitable Web-based editor is at an advanced stage. To solve the problems we now face will require a radical rethink of how we mark up texts, and the adoption of globally interoperable standards to which these internal representations can be easily converted, such as HTML, plain text and RDFa. 5