John Hagerson wrote:
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Could someone please explain the benefit of semantic tagging and why it won't horribly lengthen the amount of time required to produce an eBook?
Well, I'll try: First, let me say that for many works, for the purpose of *reading* the work, it doesn't matter. (I'll probably be flamed for that, but never mind.) Your simple, basic, novel, in which there are a great many paragraphs of text, divided into chapters with obvious headings like "CHAPTER II", don't really need much more than the very basic, simple HTML P tag. However, not all works are so simple. Yesterday I had cause to look at Immanuel Kant's /The Science of Right/, in which the author chose to use a great many divisions, subdivisions, sections, etc. -- all with their own headers. Since I converted this from plain text to HTML, I needed to determine from the plain text which were headings, subheadings, sub-sub-headings, etc. And unfortunately, this has required some guess-work by me. So, one benefit of more detailed tagging would be that for such a work, it would be made obvious and explicit which were headings, and which sub-headings. In other words, the structure intended by Kant is recorded in the tagging. Another example: look at any play. You have speech, names of speakers, stage directions, headings, and divisions into Act and Scene. All of these are made explicit by the tagging. Without tagging, there may well be confusion at some point as to what is speech and what is stage direction, for example. In a plain text file, we do make some effort to distinguish different elements of a work: quotations are indented, headings in UPPER CASE and centered, etc. But any kind of complexity in the work tends quickly to make that unworkable. Regards, Steve -- Stephen Thomas, Senior Systems Analyst, Adelaide University Library ADELAIDE UNIVERSITY SA 5005 AUSTRALIA Tel: +61 8 8303 5190 Fax: +61 8 8303 4369 Email: stephen.thomas@adelaide.edu.au URL: http://staff.library.adelaide.edu.au/~sthomas/