Scribe (markup language)

Scribe is a markup language and word processing system which pioneered the use of descriptive markup.

Scribe was revolutionary when it was proposed, because it involved for the first time a clean separation of structure and format.

History

Beginnings

Scribe was designed and developed by Brian Reid of Carnegie Mellon University. It formed the subject of his 1980 doctoral dissertation, for which he received the Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1982.

Reid presented a paper describing Scribe in the same conference session in 1981 in which Charles Goldfarb presented GML, the immediate predecessor of SGML.

cribe sold to Unilogic

In 1979, at the end of his graduate-student career, Reid sold Scribe to a Pittsburgh-area software company called Unilogic, founded by Michael I. Shamos, another Carnegie Mellon computer scientist, to market the program. Reid said he simply was looking for a way to unload the program on developers that would keep it from going into the public domain.

Michael Shamos was embroiled in a dispute with Carnegie Mellon administrators over the intellectual-property rights to Scribe. The dispute with the administration was settled out of court, and the university conceded it had no claim to Scribe. [ [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/chronicle-10aug2001.html The Chronicle: August 10, 2001: 2 Scholars Face Off in Copyright Clash ] ]

Time-bomb

Reid agreed to insert a set of time-dependent functions (called "time bombs") that would deactivate freely copied versions of the program after a 90-day expiration date. To avoid deactivation, users paid the software company, which then issued a code that defused the internal time-bomb feature.

Richard Stallman saw this as a betrayal of the programmer ethos. Instead of honoring the notion of share-and-share alike, Reid had inserted a way for companies to compel programmers to pay for information access [cite web
url=http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch01.html
title=Free as in Freedom - Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software
first=Sam|last=Williams
publisher=O'Reilly
quote="For Reid, the deal was a win-win. Scribe didn't fall into the public domain, and Unilogic recouped on its investment. For Stallman, it was a betrayal of the programmer ethos, pure and simple. Instead of honoring the notion of share-and-share alike, Reid had inserted a way for companies to compel programmers to pay for information access."
date=March 2002
accessdate=2008-09-26] (see MIT's hacker culture declines).

Using Scribe Word Processor

Using Scribe involved a two phase process:
* Typing a manuscript file using any text editor, conforming to the Scribe markup.
* Processing this file through the Scribe compiler to generate an associated document file, which can be printed.

The Scribe markup language defined the words, lines, pages, spacing, headings, footings, footnotes, numbering, tables of contents, etc, in a way similar to HTML. The Scribe compiler used a database of Styles (containing document format definitions), which defined the rules for formatting a document in a particular style.

Because of the separation between the content (structure) of the document, and its style (format), writers did not need to concern themselves with the details of formatting. In this, there are similarities to the TeX formatting system by Donald Knuth.

ee also

* Markup language
* TeX

References

External links

* [http://xml.coverpages.org/mt98-papers.html#reid Brian Reid's keynote at the Markup Technologies '98 conference, in PowerPoint]
* [http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/showlanguage.prx?exp=2481 reason why Brian Reid obtained a Hopper Medal for Scribe]
* [http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/sample/syntax/free_as_in_freedom.richard_stallman_crusade_for_free_software.sam_williams.sst.html free as in freedom : richard stallman crusade for free software]