On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 6:31 PM, John Redmond <john_redmond@optusnet.com.au> wrote:
3. Given that we share a primary interest in books (text), it makes sense that the XML should conform to the XHTML doctype.
But XHTML sucks for books. There's no sidenote/footnote/endnote markups, there's no titlepage mark-up (which would make title and author automatically readable in most cases), etc.
As any user of LaTeX will know, it is just a matter of hand-polishing the intermediate LaTeX files before the final conversion to PDFs.
It's never "just" a matter of hand-polishing; that's a serious flaw. Especially as it would have to be done for every separate size of PDF.
SO, if PG were to establish and maintain canonical XML texts, would it not be future-proofed?
XML is not magic; many blobs of XML are opaque to any but their generators. HTML will probably be around for forever, but as I said above, it's suboptimal for books. -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.