BB said:
"well, don't get too delighted. because a "true believer"
in xml/tei will never see eye-to-eye with me long-term. :+)
but yes, i saw some promise in your message last year,
where you argued in favor of the use of light-markup...
the thing is, you never answered my question about
what the need is for a "heavy" format, if it is merely
being generated from the "light" version to start with."
We can continue to find something to agree about: Yes, your restyling of
my HTML _does_ look better than mine, but primarily because you didn't
use my off-the-shelf all-purpose ugly-dreadful CSS. Your (centering)
treatment of the TOC is a style that I had tried and rejected (just
because it didn't appeal), but these are small issues. Now the structure
of the document comes from _my light markup_, with the very big
qualification that, to generate the endnotes, I had to do a good deal of
cutting and patching of the original text. In that respect, this was (or
is) not a very typical case.
So, where are we? We have used light markup, plus the patching, to
structure the document. The markup _was_ light, because the style of
document did not require anything more. Heavy markup? What if we have a
more technical document that demands lists and tables? The markup _has_
to be heavier. Surely we can agree on that!
So consider my "true belief" to be that a markup system, to be useful
for a range of documents, _has_ to have some heavy options in the back
cupboard.
John Redmond
