Hi All, Lets get some facts straight here. Mr Hart has always been interested in preserving TEXTS from day one! Go back to the newsnet archives for the proof. Yes, accessibility was a very important theme for him. He choose his Plain Vanilla Text Format as a "master format". WHY? It was the most greatest common denominator of the time. Furthermore, it fulfilled his requirement that the texts can be read by humans and computers alike!! PVT did have its draw backs. Formatting was lost, but was considered an acceptable cavet. The discussion of a master format goes backs to the early days. I tried to get Mr Hart to accept something else. The only flaw in Mr Harts vision was that he did not see, at the time, that users would want more pleasing looking texts. At the time this was not possible, without restricting accessibility across plattforms and devices. ( I read my first PG text on a Newton) Furthermore, not everyone had the tools or knowledge to handle anything more than simple text. Well, the formats being used today are easily human readable. The situation is even worse! The epub-standard can not be called a standard. It says devices may or may not implement a feature. E-readers are poorly designed, from a software perspective, it would not be hard for them to render HTML properly. The argument that they would not be fast enough or it would use to much memory is simply ridiculous! As far as HTML5 is of concern, we do not need to be on the cutting edge or use everything in it. Anybody, old enough to remember the browser wars? There were tons of web sites that look good in one browser, yet refused to work in another! Yet, most refused to use the greatest common denominator when designing there sites. It was not easy, but could be done. Computing has come a long way, but the ignorance is still there! If you want to preserve, the you need a good idea of what you want to preserve! To preserve the books in digital form all you need is a scan! of the book. To make it accessible you have to convert that to a format that preserves the layout. THAT is all that is needed! Really. All information will be there! Using textual markup has no added value for the purpose preserving the text. The so-called semantic markup (actually contextual) only over complicates the matter. The problem of layout is just shifted to another layer. Furthermore, it has absolutely of no academic value that I can see. It can not be used for text analysis, linguist analysis. So what is left for the purists out there. Whatever master format you use it should do two things adequately preserve the original layout, and be able to be converted to the formats acceptable by the devices available today and the future. regards Keith.