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Originally Posted by Jaapjan
Actually, it sounds like you want a page-oriented webbrowser supporting xhtml. That would have about all the features you need.
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You're right that using browsers has made me want some of their features in an e-reader.
Browsers can handle tables too, and not many e-readers can, for that matter.
But I expect annotation and bookmarks as well as pages in an e-reader, and those aren't really browser strengths.
I guess the big difference is that browsers are html-oriented, and the reason for using namespaces would be in order to access xml vocabularies. You get much more with a well-marked-up document, an xml document, than you do with an html document. [1]
For that matter, I've explored using different browsers as the core of an e-reader, and of creating a plugin that would provide e-book-like behavior within a browser. You're perceptive to have picked up on this tendency of mine. No one else has remarked upon it, though probably my most stated opinion is that browsers have accustomed us to linking outside a document, to color, sound, motion graphics and interactivity, and it's time for e-books to keep pace with browsers and add similar capabilities.
(In my own mind, I don't imagine browsers and e-readers merging. But surely one program could handle both kinds of content. I guess it's like Gates seeing that Internet Explorer could really perform Windows Explorer's functions. Why not?)
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[1] What I work with in my day job are semantic technologies, and specifically with topic maps. An e-book with texts in xml will adapt to what we want to do in the coming years -- in how we relate content in one document to content in other documents -- in ways that will be harder with html and webpages. (Not discounting that rdf will be brought to bear there.) So in the short term your observation is on the money, but not in the long term.