Aule Browser: April 2010

Friday, April 16, 2010

Joel on Software and UNICODE and HTML charset

I wanted to post an note on the joelonsoftware.com page on UNICODE basics.

That page has a link to i18nguy.com which has useful pages linked.

My own habit is to use a variety of pages at fileformat.info such as the P-page and the S-page when I want a Pilcrow sign ( ¶ ) or the planet Saturn symbol or some such.

Some of my favourites are balanced quotation marks ( “ ” ) and a variety of foreign quotation marks ( »« ).

The reason for the quotation marks is so that when doing poetry markup in Curl I will not have to "escape" the keyboard dbl-quote character ( " ) which is used by the progamming language but which I don't want to use in text markup.

I seem to use the paired single-quotes ( ‘ ’ ) less often.

Here are German-style quotes: „Sein“ (will be better in a suitable font.)

Other favourites of mine are § Ç ß ä ö ü à é and ê ë è ï î ö ô along with Ä Ö Ü. The last characters should have been capital A O U with umlaut diacritics: if you see something else, you may have to change a browser VIEW setting for Encoding for your web browser.

If you are a Windows user who wants to copy and save these to a notepad cheatsheet, remember to save the file as UTF-8 on the SAVE AS menu. When you need an é in a hurry, holding down the ALT-key and typing 1 3 0 on the keypad and then releasing the ALT-key will place U-00E9 into most text.

IF you are a Windows user with an editor that which will not use displauy UNICODE with the default Arial Unicode MS font, well, there is always Notepad++ ... and it will allow you to save the file with or without the initial BOM bytes that indicate the encoding (which default notepad will not suppress.)

The minimal HTML header follows:

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>

For more details, here is a char-encoding link.

Note: the above links have been set to open in a tab or window other than this blog page.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Sophocles ANTIGONE in Curl web markup

At poets.aule-browser.com there is a first pass at marking-up Antigone.

This preliminary version uses fewer than 10 elements and could have been done with only five (5).

Subsequent versions will offer selectable translations, glossary, search, indexing and other features.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Curl as poetry markup: Friedrich Hölderlin

The first pages of Hölderin in Curl markup are now available at http://poets.aule-browser.com/

These poems are formatted very simply using {poem } and within that {stanza }.

Some poems have alternate presentations as two columns of verse using
    {table {row {cell verses} {cell verses} }}

Because of the ease of formatting, most of Hoelderlin should be available in Curl format within a few days.

Most have indexing in the page by verse - again using a simple text format procedure: each stanza only requires a line at the top with a {sec num} such as
    {sec 5}
    {stanza
         a verse here
    }

Very little Curl know-how is required, but the aim is to provide a visual tool to select and edit a layout.

The real strength comes when adding in annotations and linking to critical materials. I will also being doing an MDI example with alternate translations of a poem in German, French, Spanish or Russian.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Heidegger and Cassirer

Over at phil.aule-browser.com/truth.htm I have a series of links to Curl versions of an eText: Heidegger's "On the Essence of Truth" in John Sallis' English translation (the Curl RTE browser plugin is required to view these pages as an eBook.)

A more interesting version might juxtapose the Heidegger of 1929-1945 with Ernst Cassirer.

It is clear from the Freiburg Inaugural lecture through the lectures of 1930 and 1932 which comprise the 1943 "The Essence of Truth" that Husserl is not the target. Heidegger had effectively disposed of Jaspers of Heidelberg in his 1927 "Sein und Zeit" and may have imagined that he would dispose of Einstein in a second volume. The remaining target was Cassirer in Hamburg.

Cassirer's 1923 first volume of his "Philosophy of Symbolic Forms" opens with the concept of "being". That volume closes with what may be a clue to the Heidegger opus: "wisan". What we have here is not just a Heidegger pun on "Wesen" but a clue to Heidegger's language and philological idiosyncracies: only in emerging in the opening that is the historic "facing" (in my interpretation, the Warrior out of concealment, onto the field of battle or the lover emerging from her dissimulations in clothing, manner, attitude) that in victory or defeat we become known as what we were (the destined great nation, the destined lover, geworfen, geschicht.)

Another clue is in the Cassirer quote from Plato's "Sophist" on "koinon ton genos" when placed in contrast to "koinon genos" in Section 6 of the Heidegger essay with its emphasis on sophistry.

That Husserl is simply side-stepped should be clear from the 1943 publication blithely ignoring the Landgrebe edition of "Erfahrung u. Urteil" in Heidegger's short-schrift of any distinction of Satz and Urteil and his outrageous justoposition of Satz/Logos and later stated equivalence of "Aussage" and "Urteil".

Heidegger pun's should never be ignored any more than those of the wittier farceur, Sartre (Cassirer was known for his wit and prodigious memory.) When Heidegger choses to speak of "Umweg" in connection with his "Frage" we cannot ignore "Umfrage" and the more obvious "Abstimmung" and "Einstimmung".

Heidegger's erudtion in history of philosphy far outstripped that of Husserl and in the late 1920's and early 1930's he had listened to enough of Jaspers on his visits to Heidelberg to know where he stood. But in his years in Marburg, Cassirer had still been the legend (when Heidegger became Rector of Freiburg, Cassirer was still Rector of the new Hamburg University.) In terms of background in mathematics and science, Heidegger had only his brief exposure after he left dogmatic Catholicism (his later pronouncements on electromagnetic wave propagation on German television are trully laughable when you consider Cassirer's own books on science and specifically on relativity (on an equal footing with Russell and Reichenbach.)

Of course the critical confrontation with Cassirer comes later, at Davos, but tools for annotating philosphical texts could help to illuminate what would otherwise remain obscure.

Monday, April 5, 2010

David Frum on the iPad

I posted this note over at his "forum".
The eBook mobile device has a few challenges: one is the rejection of commercial formats by the free-software movement. The MIT web formatting language CURL (www.curl.com) was spun-off as a company and so got no traction: but it offers a great deal more than PDF. It is more than just text and imaging: we need options to comapre versions/editions/translations and options to interpolate footnotes or side-pane footnotes and to link to eTexts from footnotes and options for our marginalia, notes and annotations. Microsoft OneNote 2007 on a netbook is about the best thing at the moment.

A thinking person's eBook viewer is NOT a web browser. I ahve some notes on the topic over at aule-browser.com

Other formats include Djvu, Daisy, JBig2, MobiPocket, Plucker

EPub is basically just a ZIP file

The Curl format is a much richer alternative to HTML5 or the Literature Markup Language due to the availability of macros and user-defined formats.

Another long-shot: www.rebol.com or www.rebol.net with the arrival of Rebol3

The most neglected way to index and explore text: ICON as in arizona.edu/ICON or ObjectIcon at code.google.com (from the folks who brought SNOBOL to the humanities.)

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