Bowerbird@aol.com writes:

3) though z.m.l. will create other formats, people will prefer z.m.l., due to the viewer.

Only those people who will install a viewer to read Project Gutenberg books, probably a small percentage of those who visit Project Gutenberg.

doubt it? then join the beta-test, and tear my little baby to shreds...

You ignore my critiques, so I'd rather not waste my time writing them. Furthermore, I run Un*x, not Windows.

i don't believe you can show me many e-texts from the library that i cannot format unequivocally using zen markup language. the figure i usually give is 3%, which now is 420+ e-texts, but i'll be surprised if the number you can find gets that high. frankly, i don't think you'll be able to find more than a few...

Last time I checked, you only supported ASCII, so we can toss all our non-English texts in there. "Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsany" provides a great example of an English book where you can't just magically add the accents in from a list of accented words, because the accents are in the character's names, plus anything that has Greek, or anything discussing Eastern Europe, or translations of the Sanskrit holy works, etc. Another fact is that Project Gutenberg's books were only ASCII plain text for a long time, and still are for a large part. Thus people doing work for PG did books that could be done well in ASCII plain text. Of course, you can handle 97% today, but DP does more and more stuff that isn't just novels with purely linear text. And last, I still object to this standard. We wouldn't build a building that 3% of the people couldn't enter. We shouldn't even consider standardizing on a system that can't handle 3% of the books we do. 420 books is a lot of books, and even if it stays three percent, it will only get larger. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm