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Originally Posted by Hitch
What colophon in a "physical" ebook? For that matter, what the hell is a physical eBook?
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The second page of the book which bears contributor names and copyrights. There you can find names of artists, translators, and like, which cannot be included in the EPUB format.
It was you who was talking about DocBook, not me.
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none of us are discussing "automatic" conversions, like those browser-based "convert your book to...!" websites
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Then why are you talking about book creators who won't "tag things properly" (out of spite?)
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We all work in HTML/XHTML/CSS.
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Then there is no difference for you what to work with, HTML or XML.
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We're doing 3 books right now, that are ALL about the FONTS.
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We are talking about e-books not tied to a specific device. That means we can expect any resolutions and used fonts.
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Our average book has 3-4 revision rounds, and often, at least one of them is surrounding layout.
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What kind of layout tweaks can there be for a reflowable format intended for a random resolution, font size and face? With a proper XML format those are cared of automatically for you, there are no widows/orphans in <p>, pages broken properly before <chapter> <title>s, all due to the semantic nature of the format.
Semantic tagging does away with all the fuss and tweaking around HTML used for emulating the printed text (instead of its original intention for man pages).
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He claims that an XML e-reader
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What of Earth is an 'XML e-reader'? You are trying to reduce my point ad absurdum with strawman claims about 'reading XML' (?!)
For example, there is a VitalBooks company which makes coursebooks in their proprietary XML-based format. So the XML as a book representation technology is viable, and an open and comprehensive format can be developed for both fiction and nonfiction work.
In MOBI format, there are proprietary HTML extensions for semantic markup of dictionaries, are you against it, too?
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I don't know how he plans to force authors to write in XML, or word-processing/writing software companies to export
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First you are talking about working 'directly in HTML/CSS', and now about 'word-processing exporting'?
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ePUB IS the new XML format
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EPUB is HTML5 in a ZIP archive. Nothing more, nothing less.
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XML is meant to be read by machines. HTML is meant to be read by humans.
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"EPUB is a new XML format", ergo EPUB is not for humans? I'm speechless. Is XML-compliant HTML a format 'not for humans' too?