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!
Microsoft has failed. Adobe has failed (and they have the only product that has real traction for highly technical users.) Google keeps trying with Google Docs, but that's clearly unsatisfactory.
The fundamental problem of WYSIWYG is that you can 'see' only the presentation. The semantics you have to infer with your brains. That's hard if your brain has been rotted by a lifetime of WYSIWYG use. Another, GOOD POINT. BUT, WYSIWYG is not the problem. WYSIWYG is basically, your standard light-markup up! Now, for many it is easier to FORMAT- text with mark-up "Tags"/Elements that have a relation to semantic structures.
HTML is a purely presentational markup and shares all the problems of WYSIWYG and adds some of its own.
It is practically impossible to teach good markup to people that have had a prior exposure to HTML: as potential markup editors they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. WRONG! You have to tell the to forget everything the have learned so far and teach them what good mark-up practice is!
(This doesn't preclude that HTML is a good machine format. It just isn't suited for authoring. You don't write your code in assembler.) I do some assembler once and a while, but then for a very specialized purpose! But, you bring up another interesting point. Most do not need assembler anymore because the programming tools are so good that assembler optimization is hardly needed any more. So want is needed are GOOD TOOLS.
But, most do not mark-up or programming from the bottom up! They insist their tools are the best and know best. Though there are ways do going things better. Even if you can demonstrate it to them.
What is technically possible with HTML, X or otherwise, makes no difference at all unless there's an editor supporting it that is approximately as easy to use as what people write their emails with, and captures syntactic artifacts.
Machines cannot capture semantic yet. (And when they do, Google's automatic output will surpass DP's human output not only in quantity but also in quality, thus making DP obsolete.)
DP should have educated their processors about semantic markup. They have failed this in the same way they have soundly slept thru the technological changes of the last 5 years. (At least I wasn't able to find a single FAQ about sematic markup at DP and DP's output doesn't look like they are getting it.)
Until the average person at DP cannot tell a paragraph from not a paragraph, every discussion about formats and tools is moot.
The real question is true semantic markup needed! You yourself have mention that the semantics is in the mind. Besides, what is a Chapter title? It, too is a paragraph, in most cases! regards Keith.