Quote:
Originally Posted by bowerbird
um, to repeat, there's a good reason why no one will write an "improved"
gutenberg-to-html converter. it's the same reason that made ron burkey
give up on gutenmark, namely, the inconsistencies riddling p.g. e-texts.
until those inconsistencies are cleaned up, a converter is a pipe-dream...
however, once those inconsistencies _are_ cleaned up, we no longer need
to _convert_ the e-texts to _any_ other format, because their consistency
will mean that viewer-programs can be made to handle their native format.
this presents the existential conundrum of heavy-markup.
until it can be applied _automatically_, its cost is too high.
but once it _can_ be applied automatically, it's unnecessary,
because the very same routines that convert text to xhtml so
that xhtml can be rendered by a display-program can instead
be put into a viewer-app that eliminates the xhtml middleman,
by working directly with the text as its input to create its output.
once you understand this, deeply, markup becomes a bad joke.
we take simple text and turn it into complicated markup, and then
we need a complicated program to handle the complicated markup
and turn it back into simple text that can be displayed. it's just silly.
once i show people markup is unnecessary, they'll laugh at you for doing it.
and i don't say that to _mock_ you; i say it so you can avoid looking stupid...
-bowerbird
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On automatically converting gutenberg e-texts:
There is absolutely no reason why a converter cannot be developed that handles
most of the iconsistencies correctly. Your problem seems to be that you aim for
perfect conversion of
all texts. That's never going to happen. And how does inventing a new lightweight markup language (when there are already tons of them out there) solve anything? The gutenberg etexts are still going to have to be converted to that markup. ANy converter written by somebody who knows what he's doing will be designed to represent semantic information internally using an object model, then adding output formats will be trivial.
On using lightweight markup in general:
1. You think of html as "heavy" markup. Not everyone is as limited.
2. I'd have no problem with lightweight markup if all I cared about was simple texts with headings a few links and some images. I don't want my documents limited to the very small set of features imposed by lightweight markup.