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What makes the efforts of the Hungarians in creating and using this format / schema so great?
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I don't know if anything does. I thought the fact that this was a standard created and actively used by a National Library authority noteworthy though.
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How does it improve upon any of the existing file standards?
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It--mostly--marks up stuff semantically. It's an excellent source format for conversion into whatever output/display format is preferred.
Not that I know of any tools that use it as a source (though the National Széchényi Library doubtless uses such tools internally, and I do plan on writing one myself as well), but any conversion tool could more easily (and with greater confidence) generate valid output documents from this sort of an XML format than it could from either plaintext, HTML, or anything else in-between.
It's a bit like docbook, I suppose, except that it was designed by a national library and has already been (presumably sufficiently successfully) put to use to a very diverse set of 600+ documents. Put to use by a single authority, without unnecessary variation in the format or its implementation. (There's obviously lots more docbook books out there... but my experience in the past gave me the impression that in many cases it is a format that either limits the fidelity of the content or requires ad-hoc extension of it.)
I think that's the best I can answer the question... will it do?
- Ahi