greg said:

I put huge backing into addressing this challenge, and so did other people on this list and elsewhere. The answer was: TEI.

you're out of touch, greg. in a massively spectacular way. the learning curve on .tei is too steep for your volunteers. not just a little too steep, either... far and away too steep. which was obvious to even the most oblivious observers... and furthermore, your workflow never worked correctly... even the handful of volunteers who _tried_ to make it work ended up banging their heads against the wall repeatedly... that's no way to treat your workers. even if you paid them. and you don't. you expect them to undergo torture for free. you would know all this if you merely read the d.p. forums. so your first answer was a non-answer. indeed, a non-starter.

Then, a couple of years later, ditto. The answer was: RST.

oh please. none of the proper groundwork was done on .rst... it's a proven methodology, one that is in use all over the place, one that's used to handle documents that are very complicated. but even now, you guys cannot get it to work correctly even for the comparatively simple types of documents that you prepare. and you'd know _that_, too, if you just read the d.p. forums... further, you didn't try to address the desires of the volunteers. you just dumped .rst in the middle of the street, and hoped that they would eat the dogfood. they sniffed it, but it smelled bad, so they turned their noses up at it, and that was the end of that. and just as with .tei, a handful of d.p. people have tried .rst, but -- just as with .tei -- it doesn't really make them all that happy. the converter is a buggy "work-in-progress", and marcello is... well, marcello is marcello, so of course shit's never _his_ fault, it's always the fault of someone else. so of course that's a fail. was there ever any reason to expect anything else? nope. none.

There are scarce few things that TEI or RST are not suitable for

neither of them seems capable of making d.p. volunteers happy. but maybe that's not an important function in _your_ world, greg.

The WWers have procedures to process such files - bring it on.

you've never reminded me so much of george w. bush as right now. let's go place a "mission accomplished" banner on gutenberg.org...

Remaining problems include: - how to convince contributors to make new submissions in these master formats

that shoulda been your _second_ order of business. (your first, which you still haven't done, by the way, is to iron out the bugs in your converter workflow.)

- consideration of alternate master formats, as desired

the more the merrier!

Solved problems include: - automatically generating all derived formats, with a far higher level of integrity than other master formats

bullshit!

- applying fixes to the master and then regenerating derived formats

no, you don't know how to do that either.

- having an easily editable master format

.rst is one of the heavier light-markup formats around... but as you're desperate, i'll grant you this one, for now...

But the unfortunate fact is that the "better mousetrap" (or, at least, one that purports to have many of the improvements over HTML+text as master formats), was built and delivered years ago.

if you really believe that, greg, that's sad. just plain sad. because that is so removed from reality that it's pathetic.

But not too many folks have taken the bait.

that's because your bait tastes like crap.

I can already hear a few voices calling (or writing), "that's because your bait sucks!"

it doesn't surprise me that you could already hear us saying that your bait tastes like crap, because it does.

and "but your bait cannot do X" and so forth.

that too. most of what it cannot do is give the people who do postprocessing over at d.p. what they require. which is why it's a wonder you ever thought it'd "work". just exactly who do you think is _doing_ the work?

It would be contrary to past experience for anyone to think they can, indeed, come up with a solution set that will be above criticism.

bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. i demonstrated "a solution set" right here, last week, from test-suite through .html to .mobi and .epub... your not looking at it doesn't negate its existence... -bowerbird