Bowerbird wrote:
lee said:
The problem is that historically Project Gutenberg has been considered a NMA (No Markup Allowed) zone.
just because _you_ can't "see" the markup, lee, doesn't mean that it isn't there...
one or more leading-spaces in a line is a signal that the line should not be wrapped to the line above it...
as you are someone who worked on "tidy", i'd have expected that you'd be familiar with this convention, since -- to the best of my knowledge -- tidy uses it...
there _are_ difficult cases. but the ones wally gave are straightforward applications of dirt-simple rules...
I'm under the impression that PG did not establish any rules or guidelines early on in the game as to how to format plain text to unambiguously express various document structures. ZML is intended to be such a uniform ruleset for regularizing plain etexts. In fact, the need for Bowerbird to even invent ZML indicates to me that he saw a need for ZML after he studied PG etexts and saw variations in conventions. Bowerbird is the expert on this, so I defer to him to discuss if indeed he saw variation in how PG plain texts communicated structure. No matter, I believe that eventually all the older PG texts, including a lot of the classics, will be remastered (probably by DP) into TEI or XHTML. They will definitely NOT be mastered in ZML. If ZML is used at all, it will be as a derivative format so the plain text enthusiasts have something uniform to use. Jon