[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

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.

No kidding! Now he's saying he's NOT talking about TEX. If he's not, what the HELL is he talking about? What "format" of XML eBook exists that isn't TEX?

I forgot about DOCBOOK. Yes, that seems what he is talking about. What a freaking nightmare that is.

And, now he's saying that he meant the colophon differently, so I'm completely lost. I don't understand what on earth he's talking about. He originally said, when mentioning colophon:

It is always 'tagged' in colophon; it would be in proper metadata if such existed.

to which I replied, about DocBook, and now he says:

No, the colophon in a physical (e-)book.

I'm completely lost. Neither sentence makes any sense to me. What colophon in a "physical" ebook? For that matter, what the hell is a physical eBook? I realize that the poster in question is not a native English speaker, but I don't follow this at all.

For the record: colophon is a SCHEMA that was used in DOCBOOK, for those of you late to any of the parties. DocBook, eBooks, this conversation...

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.

...which is the point I'm trying to make. To me, you can only make this work if it's RIGID. And therein lies the rub.

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.

Holy carp, is this guy talking about something like a basic Calibre conversion? An AbbyFineReader raw conversion? Man, no wonder he's confused. @Sarmat89: none of us are discussing "automatic" conversions, like those browser-based "convert your book to...!" websites or Smashwords. We're all discussing the ePUBs and eBooks that we all make by HAND.

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.

There are NONE for XML, that's for damn sure. I've looked trust me. The only one worth a damn is Oxygen, if you want WYSIWYG. And no: I don't know a single respectable eBookmaker that works in WYSIWYG. We all work in HTML/XHTML/CSS. In that realm, really, Sigil is the best in class, as we all know. The other WYSIWYGs are those like Jutoh, Atlantic (which is really a word-processor with an ePUB export function), etc.

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.

OMG, they damn sure do. We're doing 3 books right now, that are ALL about the FONTS. We have another 5 that have extremely painstaking layout issues surrounding them. The rest are fairly typical, but these 8 stand out to me because they have been major pains in the tuchus. There isn't an author on earth who doesn't CARE about how their final book looks, trust me. In 3,000+ books, I've had ONE client that wanted us to upload the books for him/her, without looking at them and approving them. One! Our average book has 3-4 revision rounds, and often, at least one of them is surrounding layout. The tweaks may be minor, but bygod, they are still important to that writer or publisher.

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.

Yes, exactly.

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.

And this seems to be the gist of the issue. I genuinely think, despite Sarmat89's assertions, that he really doesn't understand how ePUB happens. I don't say this to be derogatory; but there seems to be a major disconnect between WHAT is ePUB, itself, and WHAT is caused by how people MAKE those books. After all this, 99% of what he's complaining about still seems to be the METADATA and semantic tagging. I don't get why he thinks it's the fault of ePUB. I truly don't.

Nor, like eSchwartz, do I understand how he purports to solve the problem, if such exists. He claims that an XML e-reader already exists (really? Even Wikipedia doesn't list one), that WYSIWYG XML editors are freely available (I wish, given that I use SCHEMA on my website), etc.

I don't know how he plans to force authors to write in XML, or word-processing/writing software companies to export in it, coherently and usably, or how he'll force the vendors to sell XML ebooks, particularly as ePUB is considered an XML-based format. Nobody sees the need for a new XML format, because ePUB IS the new XML format.

I really really officially give up on this thread, kids. I think it's reached my head-banging limits.

Hitch