jim said:

I reject it not only because its ugly,

it's not ugly. besides, it's a _file-format_, which means it's not even intended that you would look at it directly, any more than you are intended to look at an .html file directly, with its obtrusive angle-brackets. you're mixed up.

doesn’t have any decent tools to support it

i have a whole slew of tools here, and am building more. further, the format is so simple, authors can build tools too.

isn’t supported or advocated by anyone world-wide except an army of one,

i'm not an army. i'm just one.

and will not be used by the other volunteers in any case

won't be used by the d.p. people, that's for sure, not if they know it's from me, because they are so stubborn they don't know what's good for them... which tickles my funny-bone on a constant basis...

but more importantly because I find cases on a daily basis cases of things I need to encode as a transcriber where I say “well obviously there would be no good way to address *this* issue using Bowerbird’s scheme.” 

well, that doesn't surprise me on bit, jim, because you don't know jack-shit about my little "scheme". but i am being quite sincere when i tell you that i would _love_ to hear about these so-called "cases." you should be told that i have put out many calls for such "cases", and nobody has ever been able to meet the challenge. so step up, jim, and be the first.

And then, having established one has to transcribe into an ugly format, which I certainly think html, xml, and TEI are also, one comes rapidly to the conclusion that there is no way that an input transcription format and an output rendered file format *ought* to be one and the same thing because to do so needlessly subjects the end reader to unnecessary ugliness.

jim, you keep talking about "input" and "output", and you're just confusing yourself with that terminology...

Not to mention that PG is rendering to 80 different output file formats in any case so why *insist* that there be only one input transcription format “holy grail” in the first place?

the benefit of a "master" format is that you only have to store and maintain that one format. so it's cost-effective. but thanks for playing, we'll have a consolation gift for you. -bowerbird