Ron wrote:
1. The basic format that I have converted to is OpenOffice 's XML format from which multiple conversions - PDF and MS doc if you want - are derived. . All essentially driven from a set of DTD's. My brief reading of TEI is that it too uses an XML base. So we have a trivial level of commonality as a starting point. By looking at the conversion processes we could have a WSYIWYG editor off-the-shelf at $0 cost with output convertible to TEI output by driving it through appropriate XLST's and all that good stuff. OpenOffice has a pilot development with DocBook to do something similar. It is not making much progress but with the right effort it could.
For maximum archivability, repurposeability and accessibility, it is important for the XML markup vocabulary used in the master document to be wholly structural and semantic. Except where absolutely necessary (and maybe best solved using SVG and MathML), presentational markup should be avoided. TEI is primarily structural/semantic, but there are some presentational components. The base DP-TEI (I envision three levels of DP-TEI), when it comes into being, should not specify any presentational markup components. I am not familiar with OpenOffice's XML vocabulary, but I would guess that it, too, is a mix of structural/semantic tags with presentation tags (I also guess that it is much more presentationally-oriented than TEI, and doesn't have the structural/semantic richness of TEI.) If OpenOffice's XML vocabulary is to be used, it should be subsetted (at least at the base level) to not allow presentational markup. I do not recommend DocBook as the primary markup vocabulary for general books, but certainly it is intriguing to consider it as a second "blessed" vocabulary for particular types of documents it is designed for (primarily technical documents.) Just my $0.02 worth. Jon Noring