Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael Hart was given, by pure luck, an operator's account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois.
Michael Hart decided that the best way to use this windfall was to convert the worlds great literature to electronic versions. The rest is history, and "Project Gutenberg". Just as the invention of the printing press was responsible for a wide spread increase in literacy, so has the electronic age lead to a truly global communication network.
When Michael started his pioneering work markup languages and the internet were far in the future, so he stored all his documents as 'Plain Vanilla ASCII'. Now with the web, the internet and XML we have reached a stage where we can begin to convert some of these documents to XHTML and XML.
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The HTML Writers Guild and Project GutenbergWhat better way is there to leave a gift to future generations than to mark up documents in XHTML or XML, and who is better to do this than members of the worlds largest organization of 'markup professionals', namely ourselves.
Marking up a document in XHTML means that it can be easily read and printed out. If it is also marked up in a descriptive XML then we can also search through it and analyze it using computer driven tools. Even the most basic markup adds a tremendous value to a document. Further more XML allows the addition of scholarly footnotes that are easily distinguished from the regular text.
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Comments: 10
(This is a "Gather Pick"?)
Gather asked you to copy a web page and post it so they could feature it as a Gather Pick? If that's the case, Gather gets a "1", too.
"I guess you are too much of a critic to be able to understand that not everything needs to be original!"
I guess so. I stand by my "1" -- it's what I give all completely unoriginal content, e-mail forwards, or copyrighted content posted without permission that I have the misfortune of opening and giving a page view.
Have you ever considered just NOT looking at "obviously" copied material? When i see something I don't want to see, or I don't like, I simply close the window and move on. Are you so small and petty that you just have to ATTACK everything that doesn't suit YOU? Incase you haven't noticed you are not the only person on the planet.