On Sat, 20 Aug 2005, Joshua Hutchinson wrote:
The problem is, once you've create the first version (let's say it is the UTF-8 encoded plaintext format), you now have to do the manual work for the other formats. Sometimes this is trivial, sometimes it is not. But to make matters worse, it is not uncommon to notice a typo in the HTML that you didn't fix earlier. Now, you have to go back to the other versions and make the same "fix". This very quickly becomes an organizational nightmare as I'm sure you can imagine.
XML solves this to a large extent. I create one "master" document and then literally click a button and I get a UTF-8 encoded .txt file, a Latin-1 encoded .txt file, an ASCII encoded .txt file, a HTML encoded file, and a PDF file. I post all of them to the ww'ers in a fraction of the time. Plus, if someone down the road finds a problem in the text, the fix can be applied to the master XML and the others files can be regenerated.
I'll add this to Josh's well-worded message. For the white washers and anyone doing maintenance on the PG files, having a variety of file formats to deal with does sometimes make quite a headache. Recently, I was making some corrections in a text that was in the collection in txt, htm, and rtf formats, and I can tell you that editing rtf manually is not fun. Also a note that for the example Josh mentioned above, after he submits the files, a white washers will review them with some automatic checking before being posted, and any corrections being made will need to be done individually to each file format. Andrew