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Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan
Tex, my God, the newest thing in the world  (Not laughing at you idea but the big novelty which was proposed). And, yes, I know Tex. And yes, I've used it... without fancy editors... so using for writing a book... perhaps we can go to LaTex... |
Not my idea! I know Tex since I had to use it at the university, more than 20 years ago! I do absolutly not recommend it for anything other.
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Originally Posted by Hitch
No. It's NOT. The colophon in DocBook (see, guys? I just KNEW that this would come back to DocBook. Always does) is just another SCHEMA. That doesn't mean that the bookmakers WILL TAG the content. Don't you understand that?
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I forgot about DOCBOOK. Yes, that seems what he is talking about. What a freaking nightmare that is.
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Originally Posted by Sarmat89
We are talking about primitive readers which rely on HTML for displaying book pages. The quality readers can process XML directly, giving the better results due to the element standardization and rigid roles.
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Ok, and how will the readers interpret the XML without a hard forced schema? It needs to know all the tags and the meaning of the tags. XML without a schema is meaningless. Also, if you look at novels (lets take the simplest form of books...), I can easily come up with several titles that vary in styles/layout in the text without being able to use semantics to make the distinction. If I cannot use semantics, then what? "Sorry Author X, you cannot express your creativity since it does not fit in the semantics and schema of our current format..." Yeah, right.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sarmat89
The EPUB problem is that it cannot be used for the quality work. The EPUBs being result of automatic TXT->EPUB conversion are irrelevant to discussion.
There is several FREE E-book WYSIWYG editors. Whether the underlying format is XHTML or custom XML is not important.
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Ouch, have you even looked at the various books here or from others on this site? They are quality work and not automatic conversion. Automatic conversions are not quality work. They are even quality if you look at the code.
Can you tell me of two, or even one, FREE e-Book WYSIWYG editor? I know of NONE. Not real WYSIWYG. Furthermore, it is not important right? You just need to add the semantics and everything is fixed... We don't need no stinking layout apparently. Also, no self-respecting eBook maker will use a WYSIWYG editor. They will look at code, whether it is XHTML or XML doesn't matter.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sarmat89
You don't need 'art' while creating books. You need to provide semantics, and the reader software will do the rest.
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Again with this nonsense. Often writers have a certain image of how the layout of the book should be, for whatever reasons. It is not up to the software. Also, without a very rigorous schema this cannot be done and that will restrict the writers/publishers too much.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sarmat89
The books are not created for bookmakers, they are created for distributors, who need proper metadata, and end users, who need a standardized format with high customization and predictable formatting, and obviously, proper metadata too.
I care about the useable format, with the semantic structure included.
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Wrong, the books are created for the readers (not users, thank you very much) and the writers. They don't care for the format, but about the experience. Readers don't want to fuss with fonts, margins, indents and so on. They want to read. Some things are great if they can be changed, like text size.
I grant that ePUB has some shortcomings, like the handling of footnotes, but not nearly as big as you depict. Sure, I would like to have the Dublin Core extended with more book related metadata, but that has nothing to do with ePUB. Also, I can create my own metadata (like series information) and Calibre has certain metadata built in. Heck, there are even some readers that understand the Calibre metadata.