Am 28.02.2011 um 17:50 schrieb Lee Passey:
On Mon, February 28, 2011 12:46 am, Keith J. Schultz wrote:
Am 27.02.2011 um 18:54 schrieb Marcello Perathoner:
On 02/27/2011 09:34 AM, don kretz wrote:
Certainly not one with the sophistication to enable them to use the breadth of markup required to even edit the poor meagre subset of syntactical information (not even chapters) incorporated into the elegant products coming from DP.
ROTFL. They may be elegant but they are non-functional. They work on desktop-sized screens only, for suitably small values of 'work': Try to narrow your browser window to the typical 5-6 words per line of a mobile phone. Breakage galore! And, yes!, a substantial portion of PG downloads go to mobile phones.
Good Point! BUT, that is because the are not developing towards smaller screen sizes then. WHICH, they they should be doing if targeting the epub format!
I disagree. Production of e-books should be a two-step process. First, the book should be marked up in a semantic way which preserves, to the greatest extent possible, the structure and metadata of the book and which does so in a machine-readable format (markup should be unique, explicit and unambiguous). Then, a computer process should be invoked which can transform the semantic markup into whatever presentation is required. First, evidently, all do not understand what semantic markup is. All talk about semantic markup, which is text semantics and is actually, syntactical, or semio-syntactic. Tags such as chapter, verse, etc are syntactic by nature. Or for the less involved describe the semantics that its syntax. [snip, snip]
I am of two minds on this subject. I am nowhere near as pessimistic as Mr. Perathoner about the ability of humans to learn new techniques and paradigms. And yet, there is something about this presentation/semantic dichotomy that seems to go much deeper that just training.
You do not need to train the to a new paradigm, Give a tool that does not let them go outside of the paradigm. Please, do not mix the actual author of a new text/book in TeX, TEI or XHTML with grasping the structure of a text or book. The latter is simpler than most would think. [snip, snip]
Besides, what is a Chapter title? It, too is a paragraph, in most cases!
No it is not. You are thinking presentationally, not semantically. A paragraph is "one or more complete sentences, usually devoted to one idea and usually marked by the beginning of a new line, indentation, or increased interlinear space."
That is exactly what a chapter title/header is one sentence. Though the content is highly compress!
A chapter is "a division of a written work, especially a narrative, usually titled or numbered." A title is "a descriptive name, caption, or heading of a section of a book." O.K. This IS a bit harder that Maecellos argument! It describes very well the nature of a chapter title. Yet, semantically, it is on the same level as a paragraph. You have giving the pragmatics I can not refute you here. See my other post for clarification.
A chapter title is no more a paragraph than the phrase "Keith J. Schultz" is a paragraph, and anyone who hopes to engage in semantic markup must understand this. You are right in that Keith J. Schultz is not a paragraph. Not even an open book! But, do you know how to semantically mark-up "Keith J. Schultz"?
regards Keith