Am 25.02.2011 um 04:09 schrieb David Starner:
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. It depends how you look at XHMTL if you take XHTML proper it can be expanded to accommodate these features. But, most see XHMTL as just a wrapper around HMTL which it is not!
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. By the use of LaTeX ( XeLaTeX better) as an intermediate for the PDF is nice, but introduces some assumptions that cause the hand polishing. Though most of the "polishing" could be avoided by crafting a class that is aimed towards the XML -> LaTeX -> PDF process. A better approach would be a tool specifically designed to create the PDF from the XML itself, using XSLTs for added control.
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. Which version of HTML are you talking about. XML is used for alot of things. I do not think it will die as soon as you think. Also, XML is text and structured so it will pose the potential to be used for just as long as HTML!
regards Keith.