Hi keith, Of couse xml can handle a book if you constrain your definition of your book to only include things that can be described by xml. What if I choose to include footnotes that extend across multiple pages, including both where they are referenced in the text flow, and on what physical pages they are found? You can't just declare the possibility to be invalid because it can't be described in a strict hierarchy. On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 4:22 PM, Keith J. Schultz <schultzk@uni-trier.de>wrote:
Hi Don,
I very sorry , but are completely wrong. XML is perfectly well of handling the structures of book. The problem is how you handle and define the structure which is not predefined by the XML standard.
As far as the output is concerned that that is a matter of parsing the tree and reacting to the semantics for the entities defined therein.
Please do not forget that a paragraph is an entity of a text, where as a page is an entity of a book!
On another side. HTML actually has no concept of a page, except maybe the rendering of the file itself. Meaning that i would have to have a file per page. Then you have the same problem. Naturally, that is not how it is done. You can simulate the same semantics for page breaks in XML as in HTML, because the page break is just simulated.
regards Keith.