[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

I think he means the part early in the book (or at the end at most ebooks nowadays) where stuff is placed like version, publisher, original title (in case of translations), dates, copyright info and so on.

I usually create a class called 'colophon' for that. Easy enough to find and more than enough 'semantics'.

Ah-hah. After reading through this whole thing, again (about colophon, I mean), the light begins to dawn, overall. To answer you, though, Tox:

No, I mean..I know what a colophon in a print book IS; I just don't understand how the information in a print colophon has bupkus to do with what we were discussing. I'd said:

which assumes arguendo that the book creators would TAG that element for you.

(About the tagging of elements correctly, or at all.)

He replied to that thusly:

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

Which left me pretty much where I was a moment ago, bewildered. I assumed he'd meant the Colophon SCHEMA,which kind of made sense, if we were discussing ye olden DocBook.

But then, when I'd mentioned DocBook-Colophon, that's when he came back and said:

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

Which, if he's actually discussing ePUB formatting, makes no sense at all. I was talking about actual elements, like...images and paragraphs, blockquotes, and the like.

Thus, he is OBVIOUSLY only talking about metadata. This is why, @Tox, @eSchwartz, we all keep going round and round in circles. He's confusing the format of ePUB with whether or not Bookmaker Bob is tagging the book with metadata. It has nothing to do with the realities of the ePUB format itself. The fact that those two things are unrelated, realistically, seem to not be known to him. As an ePUB-maker himself, which he says he is, he ought to know that the semantics and meta available under the DC is fairly extensive. I can only assume that whatever process he's using isn't exposing him to those options.

Otherwise, the bit about how the colophon of a book is "always" tagged makes no sense. (I'd also note: most publishers no longer use Colophons. It's vestigial. Most simply have a logo and the copyright assertion. So...make of that what you will. 98% of all "colophons" would be utterly useless for his purposes.)

He's thinking that the METADATA and SEMANTIC tagging that he wants will all be provided in the Colophon, which obviously has no relationship whatsoever to the FORMAT of the book itself, whether in print, PDF, ePDF, ePUB, MOBI or Bob's Big Book Format.

This also explains why he's so enamored of such a rigid format. His rigidity is about the OCD-ness of qualifying this and that, so you can sort it, find it, etc. He doesn't really give two hoots about whether or not a chapter is called "chapter" in XML, or not, in XHTML. He's right--for his purposes, XML would, for the categorization of his completed/purchased books, be better. It is, after all, essentially a database for text-based data.

So, to create a database of his books, like in the Calibre Catalogue, he'd likely be better off with an XML list, of those books. (Is this a good point to mention that you can export an XML Catalogue list from Calibre?) XML formatting for his list--not XML formatting for the books themselves.

He's simply wrong about his issue being the format. BUT, you can tell from his posts--and his issue--that he's not the kind of guy that's going to change his mind.

I'm sticking with my penultimate post, however. XML is for machines, and HTML is for humans. Period.

Hitch