In addition, they provide the standard editorial fare of apparatuses, editorial headnotes, descriptions of copy texts, and the like. But Fraistat and Reiman's efforts have some drawbacks, from which I hope we can learn. If the editors were independently wealthy and could afford a vanity press edition of their poem, there would be little difference in what they include, and in fact the book version would be considerably better. Book format would even allow extensive use of parallel, facing-page texts, and the editors would not have to worry about setting up frames in HTML, or whether the reader's browser supports frames or not. And a standard table of contents and index is a superior way to describe the structure of an edition than the rather clumsy HTML table Fraistat and Reiman currently supply.
Books do book-like things better.
The question, then, and the great editorial challenge, is how to prepare texts for the electronic medium in such a way as to exploit those things that computers do better than books, and differently. Computers, as we know, have the power to search, compare, and analyze, with amazing rapidity, tremendous volumes of data, in ways that just a few years ago would have been unthinkable. But to exploit this power we must move beyond the limitations of HTML markup and employ a tagging system that allows us to ask new kinds of questions of our texts and yield interesting results. I am referring, of course, to richer implementations of SGML, such as the Text-Encoding Initiative and whatever its descendants may be in the future. When SGML was invented over a decade ago, its function was to allow us to describe the structural features of a document in such a way that any computer, running any operating system, could understand it, store it, and search it rapidly.