greg said:

So you're against storing (or creating) WAP versions, Braille versions and MP3 versions on our server? 

is that a serious question? i doubt it. but just in case, my answer is no, i'm not "against" that. indeed, i'd like to support all of that. in my offline app. i already have the option of text-to-speech saved as mp3, but you might be talking about human audio versions... (if you do mean computerized text-to-speech, it seems to me that that could be done offline too, but if you want to create, store, and serve such files, i have no objection.) as for braille, i don't have the slightest idea how to do that. and i'm almost as clueless when it comes to wap, sorry... but i'm sure z.m.l. is simple and straightforward enough that anyone who does know about these formats could write a conversion program that would do the job well... and i would retain my preference for offline converters. but i think it'd be _great_ to have online converters too! it's just that you'll need a web-programmer, i can't help, at least for now, because i've just done a little perl stuff. still, even my brief experimentation has demonstrated perl can do such conversions from z.m.l. quite easily. and i'd assume that python and ruby are just as facile.

That's cutting out a whole lot of potential readers I would like to support.

i don't think you should cut anyone out.

Nobody's stopping anyone from running a program on their own computer to do whatever conversion they like. 

i should hope not. besides, it's unlikely they could prevent it. but all that is beside the point, isn't it? the point is to _enable_ people to do these conversions. right?

Why are you trying to stop me from enabling various conversions on the server, for people who want or need to get conversion done there?

i'm not trying to stop you. i'm cheering you on. go greg! but if you are telling me .tei/.xml is the best way (let alone the only way!) to do what you want to do, then we really should have a long discussion. -bowerbird