jon said:

Well, I have written over 100,000 lines of code (Fortran) over the years. I've also written some scripts. I've edited and compiled some C code. I've written a bunch of GWBasic programs. And I have a couple associates in the XML world who are programming wizards and who I often consult with regarding what can and can't be done.

great! then i'm really looking forward to your program, jon... like i always say, the proof is in the pudding. deliver pudding.

Btw, the tk3 example you gave in the other email you just sent (and I just read), the replacement for it, SOPHIE, will be *XML-based*. The developer of tk3, Bob Stein, is the major player of SOPHIE. He's been around for years and years -- his partner is very experienced.

i brought up tk3 because david rothman mentioned it in his blog, so i took a fresh look at it. and since the topic was annotations, and tk3 is one of the programs with good annotation capabilities, it seemed appropriate. now, as you'll note in comments i made over on david's blog, i know tk3 -- and bob stein -- very well. (not personally, but i've followed his work since voyager days.) i've talked to bob, and steve riggins (and steve's wife) as well. i've even dropped some of my e-book programs on them, and they've been impressed. tell 'em to watch out for me! :+) but even after having visited the website you listed, i am puzzled. "sophie" is actually the name of an e-book viewer-app written by _richard_gaskin_, of fourth-world, another l.a.-based programmer. see it at: http://www.fourthworld.com/products/sophie/index.html so this makes me wonder if gaskin and stein are now teaming up? that would be sweet. i've been looking for a worthy competitor in the e-book viewer-program realm, and openreader has been a huge vapor bust so far, so a stein/gaskin product might be the one! but i don't see anything on either website to indicate a merger?... (after reading the .pdf, i see now that there's probably no merger. riggins works in small-talk, while gaskin uses run-time revolution. so it appears that this is just an unfortunate program-name crash, all revolving around programmers who've been on the left coast.)

Gee, I wonder why they will now change gears and embrace XML? They are *experienced* developers with a lot of knowledge of the tk3 product (over 15 years), and *they* are switching to XML.

well, wonder no more, jon, because i can tell you why. they're going for some hefty venture-capital bucks, and x.m.l. is the trend-word of the decade. if i was looking for an investor sugar-daddy, i'd be spouting x.m.l. too!

You better hurry and convince Bob Stein he needs to get rid of XML and embrace plain text!

again, you think i have something against x.m.l. i don't. if x.m.l. gave me useful tools, and hid all the complicated file-formatting under the hood, i'd be happy to embrace it. what i _do_ have something against is _vaporware_. and that's _especially_ true in regard to electronic-books, which have stagnated through cycle after cycle of _hype_ because nobody -- except for adobe -- has made it easy to _author_ electronic-books that work well on all platforms. read the "sophie" website you listed, and their .pdf, and you will find that they both say the very exact same thing: we need easy authoring-tools to make a revolution happen. but instead of delivering honest-to-goodness, simple-to-use authoring-tools, we've wasted the time fiddling with formats! and when someone comes and asks a "how do i do this?" question, we snow them with a bogus vaporware answer. and then we wonder why nothing ever gets accomplished.

You better hurry and convince Bob Stein he needs to get rid of XML and embrace plain text! Hurry, before it is too late! Your programming experience should convince them of the folly of their ways.

nah. i'll let bob burn through that investor cash instead; he's already run tk3 through a couple rounds of funding. (and got another quarter-of-a-million from u.s.c. recently. man, i wonder what p.g. could do with a cool $250,000!) yep, i _like_ to see the venture capitalists fall on their ass chasing the trend-word of the decade, i really do... :+) -bowerbird