Am 18.10.2011 um 11:51 schrieb Marcello Perathoner:
Michael's way of (non)-leading has failed spectacularly. PG has collected a big heap of books -- that's true -- but the heap is too inhomogeneous to be of any real use. Nobody uses PG books as they are. Every site I know puts PG books into their own master format before redistributing them. Here, you are not being fair to Micheal. He had a vision and turned it to reality. Of no REAL USE! Others, are USING them!
Wikipedia instead, by enforcing strict guidelines -- vilified by many -- in a lot less time, has become omnipresent. It's hard to come across a site that doesn't link to wikipedia.
Every advance in technology has caught PG with its pants down. The switch to HTML had to be done by manually redoing all the books, because plain text turned out to be non-processable. The HTML that DP has produced for years and is still producing does not work well on the new portable reading devices. Again the plain vanilla texts were his vision. From the very beginning I had advocated a different format. Plain vanilla has its, caveats. It is one of the very few formats that have survived over 30 years. And, it still used and useful. Do not get me wrong I am not a fan of PVT.
The next advance in technology will leave PG out of the game completely because PG has failed to deploy the least of technological safeguards, eg. a master format that can be made to transform into other unheard-of-today formats True, PG should develop a master format. Yet, with any format it will become dated and a conversion to a more modern one will hardly ever be able to be done automatically. (Ever tried converting databases to the newer format) Of course, if you continually update you can avoid this problem, but it always uses considerable resources.
If you can go find some real old HTML files from the beginning and see if you like what comes out. I doubt it. regards Keith.