john said:
> for me, as a volunteer, who spends
> a considerable amount of time working on books,
> but enjoys actually finishing one and seeing it posted,
> I can't get my arms around the benefits.
...
> Could someone please explain the benefit of semantic tagging
> and why it won't horribly lengthen the amount of time required
> to produce an eBook?
first of all, thank you for asking your questions.
i look forward to hearing some answers to them.
and thank you for your history of doing e-texts
for project gutenberg. it's important to retain
the volunteers who have been working all along...
i wanted to make a point about one thing you said...
> If I'm ambitious, I can create an HTML version,
> which presents the same information, but allows
> "real" formatting rather than _italic_ and *bold*.
actually, if you take a look at that "real" formatting
in the html-source, you'll see it's plain-ascii, namely:
[i]italic[/i] and [b]bold[/b]
or -- if you prefer --
[em]emphasis[/em] and [strong]strong[/strong]
except, of course, using angle-brackets
instead of the square ones that i used so
the brackets wouldn't get swallowed up or interpreted.
but yes, of course, i know what you _meant_,
which is that when the e-text is _displayed_,
the _viewer-program_ converts that "markup"
appropriately, into "real" italics and real bold,
even though there were no italics or bold in the source,
just the _tags_ that indicated that styling was present.
that is, you need to use the appropriate "user agent"
(to use the markup-geek terminology now in favor)
that knows how to interpret the markup and render it.
however, it's not that difficult to write a viewer-app
that can take the plain-text file as input and render
any words surrounded with _underscores_ as italics,
and any words surrounded with *asterisks* as bold.
it's just a different "user agent" interpreting the
different markup, and rendering it as called for...
i say that based on experience. i've written such an app.
and indeed, it's not that difficult to write a converter
that will change the underscore _form_of_italics_
into the other [i]form of italics[/i] that uses brackets.
it's rather easy to see they are functionally equivalent.
the difference between the two forms in the _raw_ file is
the underscore form _enhances_ the user's comprehension,
while the bracket form [em]obscures[/em] it, and badly...
rather than creating 14,000+ new files, with all the work
that entails, we can achieve the same end by distributing
_one_ viewer-program that utilizes the existing e-texts...
-bowerbird
