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I just skimmed over the other post. And yes, after reading that and rethinking your approach, there are many questions for me. Have you actualy watched the video, you posted in your first post? I mean, this company has made a great effort to make a norm for their publications. Resulting in ruffly 250 styles. So let me ask you a few questions, that I think you should answer for yourself to see where this project should lead to:
- Who is the target of this project? Authors, publishers, editors?
- Do you want to define your own new xml-standard for this? Why should anybody use your standard? Should I define my own? Again, who is the target? For a publisher it may make sense to develop such a scheme. But it is very difficult.
- Why not use some existing format and work from there? epub or xhtml?
- Making a scheme for your xml is like writing a mark up language, hence my mentioning of AsciiDoc. How difficult is this and how difficult is it to enforce the user to learn this language?
- Even if all your processes work, how should it work, to get my Source format into your xml?
- And a step further: Wouldn't it make more sense for me, if I could just skip this step? Why not just convert from my source to the desired output?
- Or do you want to make a xml word processor?
And again: Who is the target? It is very difficult to talk about such a project, if the goals aren't realy clear. Who should how do what with it? We only know a bit about the what.
I won't greatly go into the discussion about free software (don't know much about it). But to be true: I don't think users go into these details about the difference between free, open, proprietary etc. I use, what is best capable to do the job. And feeling forced to switch my operating system or my software just to use a "free" software has exactly the opposite effect on me. In my opinion, this does more harm to your cause, than "supporting" the enemy.
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