From 7ef1810d43b6c537e79780060f17cd6589f1055d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Jonas Smedegaard <dr@jones.dk>
Date: Thu, 8 May 2025 15:29:44 +0200
Subject: add draft background dropped from intro

---
 _background.qmd | 56 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 56 insertions(+)

(limited to '_background.qmd')

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

