david said:
So what exactly is your point?
my point, exactly, is that a lot of people here tout x.m.l. as the solution, but no one seems to want to pay the cost of actually doing the markup. why is that? as to all the verbiage about what constitutes whether a file is "human readable" or not, if we ask some humans, the answer is clear.
Since < and > are within the 0-127 character limit, XML is actually ascii text. That means it is "plain text".
um, no. an x.m.l. file is not "plain text". ask a human.
How does storing a textual work in XML in any way increase its price?
applying the markup requires expensive expertise.
In fact, it should dramatically decrease the "price", because it requires less handling to convert to any of a dozen or more formats.
or so the hype goes. but where is the pudding? meanwhile, over at blackmask, daniel has been converting the entire project gutenberg library into a half-dozen formats for several years now, based on the plain-text versions, with zero x.m.l.
And as much as I hate to bring it up, how many times have you openly exclaimed that you were leaving for good, and failed to do so?
you'll be dealing with me for a long time, david... provide some pudding. don't just talk about it. there are 17,000 e-texts waiting to be marked up. -bowerbird