ram DTD

The Rossetti DTD was written for The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypertext Archive at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. The Rossetti archive is an on-line collection of Rossetti's works and is intended for scholarly research and study. The DTD was edited by Daniel Pitti, based on previous work by Thornton Staples and the Rossetti staff.

The archive originally used multiple DTDs, one each for Rossetti's works, documents, pictures, and commentaries. This proved too complex to maintain and the DTDs were combined into one. The DTD has gone through several incarnations over its history, as the project has developed and new works have been added to the archive. The project staff decided early on that SGML was the best choice for recording and preserving documentary structures and features. They also decided that the project would not use the existing TEI DTD, which has few provisions for describing a document's physical features and assumes certain regularities that poets like Rossetti make it a rule to violate. Insted, the project developed its own specialized DTD that would best describe DGR's works, techniques, and history.

The project's goal is to preserve as much information as possible about the archive's materials to permit scholarly analysis and to present the primary materials in a useful hypertext environment. The primary materials include paintings, sketches, poems, books, and prose. The DTD is designed to capture the maximum amount of pertinent information about Rossetti's pictorial, literary, and bibliographic artistry, so that expressive, textual, and analytic information can be retrieved and displayed as desired.

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