Unquestionably one of the high spots of the TEI 10th Anniversary Conference held at Brown University in 1997 was the lunchtime performance by Brown's very own Ursa Minors of a selection from the expanding TEI Songbook. Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, you can now hear that performance in the privacy of your own headphones, while at the same time reading the cool lyrics composed by Syd Bauman and Julia Flanders.
Oh, and if you feel that your own company song doesn't fit the needs of your workgroup and you want something more SGML- or XML-specific to sing each morning, check out Tony Graham's excellent SGML/XML songs page, which has transcripts of these songs and a whole lot more besides.
Clicking on the links below will download an MP3 file for each song; or you download all five MP3s at once. You can also download all the lyrics in TEI Lite (P4) XML.
by Syd Bauman & Julia Flanders (to the tune of "Surfin' USA" by the Beach Boys)
If everybody had a notion The kind that rings a bell To modify that big Behemoth We call SGML You'd see them dropping those features That make our lives like hell Servin' up real data-- Servin' XML Look no DOCTYPE, XML Look no DOCTYPE, XML We'll all be priming our browsers And tuning our display For context-sensitive searching On servers far away-- We'll all be gone for the hour We're surfing through the bell Tell the teacher we're searchin'-- Searchin' XML We'll say goodbye to SUBDOC And to the big CONCUR We're happy ditching our DOCTYPEs Like they never were We'll be well-formed as all get out No one could ever tell That we ever had SHORTREF Or used SGML.
By Syd Bauman & Julia Flanders (to "Dust in the Wind" by Kansas)
I close my eyes-- Only for a moment, but my text is gone All those words-- pass into the ether of eternity Bits on a disk--all it was was bits on a disk Same old song-- Software from the network that I got for free Big blank screen-- "Abort Retry Ignore" is all it says to me Bits on a disk--all it was was bits on a disk Don't give up-- Text can last forever if you back up right But alas--I haven't made a backup since last Wednesday night Bits on a disk ...
By Syd Bauman & Julia Flanders (to the tune of "My Favorite Things" by Rogers and Hammerstein)
Big feature structures with <f>s and <fs>s, <Certainty> tags that record all my guesses, Page breaks and forme work and <milestone> flags, These are a few of my favorite tags. <Front>, <body>, <back> in a text with a header <Div>s nesting deeply, now what could be better? <Castgroup>s in <castlist>s and <l>s in <lg>, These are the things that I like in P3 When I'm surfing And I download Formats I deplore, I smugly reflect on my TEI text And then I rejoice once more.
By Syd Bauman & Julia Flanders (to the tune of "Do Re Mi" by Rogers and Hammerstein)
Let's start at the very beginning. A very good place to start. When you read you begin with A, B, C. When you encode you begin With T-E-I. T-E-I? T-E-I. And now I will have to tell you why T-E-I. T-E-I! T-E-I-S-G-M-L Oh, let's see if I can make it easier. T, a text, an encoded text. E, a bunch of entities. I, an IDREF for myself. S, a set of nested trees. G, a gen-e-ric I.D., M, for marking up your best, L, a metric line to me! that will bring us back to T text-text-text! Now, encoders, T-E-I-S-G and so on, are only the tools you use to build a text. Once you have these tags in your heads, you can encode a million different texts by mixing them up. Like this: G, T, M, S, I, T, E. Can you do that? G, T, M, S, I, T, E. G, T, M, L, T, E, T. G, T, M, L, T, E, T. Now, put it all together! G, T, M, S, I, T, E. G, T, M, L, T, E, T! Good! But it doesn't mean anything! So we put in tags. Two tags for every element. Like this: When you know the tags to use, T-E-I is what you'll choose!
By Syd Bauman & Julia Flanders (to "Let it Be" by The Beatles)
When I find myself with untagged data, Brother Michael comes to me, Speaking words of wisdom, Use P3 And in my hour of parsing, he is standing right in front of me, Speaking words of wisdom, Use P3 Use P3, Use P3, Use P3 yeah use P3 Write it in your DOCTYPE, use P3. And when the data capture projects tagging in the world agree, there will be an answer, Use P3 For with a sudden rapture there is still a chance that they will see the one and only answer, Use P3 And when the data's lousy there is still a helpful DTD Parse until tomorrow with P3 I wake up to the sound of progress--Lou and Michael at the door Speaking words of wisdom Here's P4! Use P4, use P4, use P4 yeah use P4, Perfecting all our data, use P4.
Selected lyrics copyright © 1997 by Syd Bauman & Julia Flanders.
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