The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature
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All the project's SGML files of the compositions in the corpus are converted into HTML 4.0 for immediate publication on this website. The site is deliberately kept as technologically simple as possible -- no images, no tables, no frames -- to enable maximum accessibility.
The current contents of the website, and the display conventions used, are described in Navigation Help.
HTML is derived from SGML, and current trends are moving towards a Web based on XML -- Extensible Markup Language, a simplified form of SGML -- with XML-aware browsers already commercially available. During the current research phase a parallel XML- and Unicode-based site will be developed, enabling much more sophisticated display and searching facilities. (The Unicode standard is, roughly speaking, an enormous expansion of the ASCII system to include many thousands of characters from the world's scripts.) However, until their use becomes more widespread, the simple HTML- and ASCII-based pages which you are now reading will continue to be available.
As searching mechanisms are implemented, with the support of the University of Oxford's Humanities Computing Development Team, the website will communicate with the SGML files using Common Gateway Interface scripts written in the programming languages Perl and Java.
More information on this and other aspects of the project's current research phase is given in the section on current work.
Next: Current work, 2001-2006
Page created on 7.ix.2001 by ER. Last revised on 7.ix.2001 by ER.