From 7ef1810d43b6c537e79780060f17cd6589f1055d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jonas Smedegaard Date: Thu, 8 May 2025 15:29:44 +0200 Subject: add draft background dropped from intro --- _background.qmd | 56 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 56 insertions(+) diff --git a/_background.qmd b/_background.qmd index fe2f35f..d099b91 100644 --- a/_background.qmd +++ b/_background.qmd @@ -9,6 +9,51 @@ serialised as RDFa (embedded in HTML) and PDF (embedded in PDF). ## Markdown +### Structural and layout annotation, and metadata + +Original Markdown provides unobtrusive markup +for content and hypermedia structure, +to ease the authoring of style-agnostic hypermedia content. +Later dialects extends the language +to cover more content and hypermedia structure, +style annotation +and text-wide metadata. + +The separation of visual concerns from content and structure +is harnessed by the document converter Pandoc +and the Pandoc-based document authoring framework Quarto: +Pandoc with Quarto plugins and templates +allows annotating a string as a hyperlink or a citation, +declaring authorship, ownership and release date, +and rendering as a scholarly paper +conforming to a prescribed style guide and document format. + +### Semantic annotation is missing + +None of the existing Markdown dialects, +however, +covers annotation of content semantics. +You cannot -- using existing Markdown dialects -- +annotate a string as contextually related to some content domain, +in a way that Markdown processors will treat it as such: +When rendering an output document +the annotation is omitted from the text +and optionally accessible as part of document metadata. + +Example annotations might include +some numbers in meter and others in nautical miles, +or one citation being supportive and another a rebuttal, +or one quote using "she" as personal pronoun +and another using it derogatory. + +Such meta information tied not to the document as a whole +but to specific strings in the text +cannot be written as such -- +i.e. structurally part of the writing +but communicatively meta to the prose content of the text. + +--- + Markdown is "probably the most popular markup language today" [@Rapp2023, p. 42]. It was originally defined by @Gruber2004 @@ -94,6 +139,17 @@ others offer optional support e.g. through plugins ## Pandoc and Quarto +The Markdown processor Pandoc can transform Markdown not only to HTML +but also to other output formats like PDF. +Pandoc offers an API for adapting its content processing +as well as a templating structure for customizing layout, +which is streamlined in the document authoring framework Quarto: +Pandoc with a set of plugins and templates +enables rendering of scholarly papers +conforming to prescribed style guides and document formats. + +--- + Pandoc is a document converter built around the markdown markup language, able to parse from and serialise to many Markdown dialects as well as equivalent subsets of other text markup languages -- cgit v1.2.3