Electronic Documents

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Electronic Documents
2
Contents

• Electronic Documents
• Paper vs Electronic
• File formats
• Standards like SGML
• Character encoding
• Font issues
• WEB documents
• Static vs Dynamic web pages
• Client scripting

Objectives
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Electronic vs Paper

• Machine readable
• Easy to edit
• Easy to distribute over distances
• Environmental friendly
• Difficult to read large material

• Not easily machine readable
• To be recreated
• Time and resources to distribute
• Large use of materials to produce
• Easy to read large material

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Electronic document reality

• Interchangeable
• If you know file format
• If you know character encoding
• If you have fonts installed

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Using Electronic Document

• What is file format?
• RTF, TXT, DOC, PDF, SXI,
• Character encoding
• Proprietary
• Standardized like UNICODE
• Public domain and published
• Fonts (Rendering)
• Proprietary
• Open type
• Device drivers for Printer and display

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Users online reading habits
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Paperless Office by 2000?

• The Facts of Office Waste
• Each person in an office on average uses 2.5
  pounds of paper each week.
• The average office worker generates between 120 -
  150 pounds of recoverable white office paper a
  year.
• Americans discard 4 million tons of office paper
  every year -- enough to build a 12 foot high wall
  of paper from New York to California.

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Complexity
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SGML

• SGML emerged 25 years ago out of the publishing
  industry
• SGML provides a framework for describing the
  logical structure of documents.
• SGML explicitly identifying the structural, or
  content, elements of documents
• SGML codify the hierarchical relationships among
  the elements.

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SGML

• Standard Generalized Markup Language, is a tool
  that can aid in the creation, management, and
  delivery of documents.

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Benefits of SGML

• information reuse
• consistency and information integrity
• impose varying levels of security on information
  components.
• collaboration in multi-author environments.
• ability to customize information products.
• ability to produce multiple output formats from
  the same information base without reformatting.
• increased longevity of information.
• improved information retrieval precision.

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Costs of SGML

• skills development and training
• SGML technical infrastructure.
• re-engineering document processes
• DTD design and maintenance.
• reduced flexibility.
• display of SGML
• handling over a network

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SGML

• ISO 8879 SGML International Standard ISO 8879
  Information Processing - Text and Office Systems
• Standardized Generalized Markup Language (SGML),
  First Edition - 1986-10-15

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General structure of an SGML document

• SGML declaration.
• Document type declaration.
• Document contents.

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SGML
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Views of a document
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Logical structure

• The logical structure captures the intent or
  meaning of a document.
• Chapters, sections, section headings, lists,
  figures, tables, paragraphs and sentences are
  examples of logical objects.
• These objects are not specifically related to any
  physical medium but are only notions that users
  have of the way documents are organized.
• Authors determine the logical structure of a
  document. Cognitive overhead can be reduced by
  concentrating only on the logical structure.

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Layout structure

• The layout is determined by a formatting process
  and controls the presentation of the document
  when being printed or viewed.
• It is also in the form of a hierarchy or tree
  with objects and subordinate objects. These
  objects correspond to physical and visible
  entities like pages and rectangular regions on
  screen or paper.
• This structure of a document is necessary for
  human consumption only.

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IT applications in office work

• ISO/IEC 2382-231994 Information technology --
  Vocabulary -- Part 23 Text processing
• ISO/IEC 2382-271994 Information technology --
  Vocabulary -- Part 27 Office automation
• ISO/IEC 8613 - series - Open Document
  Architecture (ODA) and interchange format
• ISO/IEC 9066 - series - Information processing
  systems -- Text communication -- Reliable
  Transfer
• ISO/IEC 9072-11989 Information processing
  systems -- Text communication -- Remote
  Operations
• ISO/IEC 10021-- Text Communication --
  Message-Oriented Text Interchange Systems (MOTIS)

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Office Document Architecture

• The Office Document Architecture (ODA) format is
  a markup code standard devised by the ISO. The
  companion Office Document Interchange Format
  (ODIF) is a standard for the actual encoding. As
  described by Beaujardière, ODA provides a
  framework of layout and logical structure
  information incorporating previous international
  standards for coding the actual content. For
  instance, the CGM file format is used to
  represent graphics. Unfortunately, text is
  represented in the same relative "typewriter"
  fashion as DIF and DCA.
• The ODA specification is several hundred pages in
  length. This complexity will require similar
  front-end tools as SGML in order to shelter the
  user from an endless stream of codes and
  structures.

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Document Object Model

• Document Object Model (DOM) is a form of
  representation of structured documents as an
  object-oriented model. DOM is the official World
  Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard for
  representing structured documents in a platform-
  and language-neutral manner. The DOM is also the
  basis for a wide range of application programming
  interfaces, some of which are standardized by the
  W3C.
• DOM was initially supported by web browsers to
  manipulate elements in an HTML document. DOM was
  a way of dynamically accessing and updating the
  content, structure and style of documents.
• A well-structured document can take the tree form
  using DOM.

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An Example DTD

• A DTD is expressed in SGML as a set of
  declarative statements, using a simple syntax
  defined in the standard. For our simple model of
  a poem, the following declarations would be
  appropriate
• lt!ELEMENT anthology - - (poem)gt
• lt!ELEMENT poem - - (title?, stanza)gt
• lt!ELEMENT title - O (PCDATA) gt
• lt!ELEMENT stanza - O (line) gt
• lt!ELEMENT line O O (PCDATA) gt

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XML Extensible Markup Language

• easier to implement over the Web
• easier to define document types
• easier to create supporting software
• interoperable with both SGML and HTML

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XML

• XML is a simplified subset of SGML intended for
  use over the Web. It is a grammar, like SGML,
  rather than a fixed tag set, like HTML, for
  creating tags and adding structure to documents.
• It is intended to be more powerful than HTML in
  giving documents structure, but easier to
  implement than full-blown SGML, and thus lies on
  the spectrum of complexity somewhere between SGML
  and HTML.

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First Web page

• ltHTMLgt
• ltHEADgt
• ltTITLEgtmy first web pagelt/TITLEgt
• lt/HEADgt
• ltBODYgt
•  
• Welcome to my very first webpage 
• lt/bodygt
• lt/HTMLgt

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Second Web page

• ltHTMLgt
• ltHEADgt
• ltTITLEgtmy first web pagelt/TITLEgt
• lt/HEADgt
• ltBODY bgcolor"0099FF"gt
•  
• Welcome to my very first webpage 
• lt/bodygt
• lt/HTMLgt

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Formatting text on a web page

• ltH1gtthis is h1lt/H1gt
• ltH2gtthis is h2lt/H2gt
• ltH3gtthis is h3lt/H3gt
• ltH4gtthis is h4lt/H4gt
• ltH5gtthis is h5lt/H5gt
• ltH6gtthis is h6lt/H6gt

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Link to another page

• lta href"nextpage.html"gtclick herelt/agt
• lta href"http//www.yahoo.com"gtyahoolt/agt
• lta href"index.html"gtltimg src"picture.gif"gtlt/agt
• lta href"mailtosomeone_at_nailmail.com"gt emaillt/agt
  
• lta href"spaceman.jpg"gtspaceman.jpglt/agt
• lta href"soundfile.mid"gtsoundfile.midlt/agt

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Pictures on my page

• ltimg src"picture.gif"gt
• ltimg height"90" width"120" picture.gif"gt

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The form tag

• ltFORM METHODPOST ACTION"mailtosomeone_at_nailmail
  .com" ENCTYPE"text/plain"gt
• lt/FORMgt
• ltINPUT TYPE"text" NAME"FIRST-ITEM" SIZE12gt
• ltINPUT NAME"PASS" TYPE"password" SIZE12gt

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Java Script

• Java Script is not Java
• JavaScript is close to Java in that Netscape sort
  of pared down Java into an easier set of
  commands. JavaScript cannot stand alone.
• ltSCRIPT LANGUAGE"javascript"gt
• document.write
• ("ltFONT COLOR'RED'gtThis Is produced by Java
  scriptlt/FONTgt")
• lt/SCRIPTgt