john said:
for me, as a volunteer, who spends a considerable amount of time working on books, but enjoys actually finishing one and seeing it posted, I can't get my arms around the benefits. ... Could someone please explain the benefit of semantic tagging and why it won't horribly lengthen the amount of time required to produce an eBook?
first of all, thank you for asking your questions. i look forward to hearing some answers to them. and thank you for your history of doing e-texts for project gutenberg. it's important to retain the volunteers who have been working all along... i wanted to make a point about one thing you said...
If I'm ambitious, I can create an HTML version, which presents the same information, but allows "real" formatting rather than _italic_ and *bold*.
actually, if you take a look at that "real" formatting in the html-source, you'll see it's plain-ascii, namely: [i]italic[/i] and [b]bold[/b] or -- if you prefer -- [em]emphasis[/em] and [strong]strong[/strong] except, of course, using angle-brackets instead of the square ones that i used so the brackets wouldn't get swallowed up or interpreted. but yes, of course, i know what you _meant_, which is that when the e-text is _displayed_, the _viewer-program_ converts that "markup" appropriately, into "real" italics and real bold, even though there were no italics or bold in the source, just the _tags_ that indicated that styling was present. that is, you need to use the appropriate "user agent" (to use the markup-geek terminology now in favor) that knows how to interpret the markup and render it. however, it's not that difficult to write a viewer-app that can take the plain-text file as input and render any words surrounded with _underscores_ as italics, and any words surrounded with *asterisks* as bold. it's just a different "user agent" interpreting the different markup, and rendering it as called for... i say that based on experience. i've written such an app. and indeed, it's not that difficult to write a converter that will change the underscore _form_of_italics_ into the other [i]form of italics[/i] that uses brackets. it's rather easy to see they are functionally equivalent. the difference between the two forms in the _raw_ file is the underscore form _enhances_ the user's comprehension, while the bracket form [em]obscures[/em] it, and badly... rather than creating 14,000+ new files, with all the work that entails, we can achieve the same end by distributing _one_ viewer-program that utilizes the existing e-texts... -bowerbird