[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

You already have to tag 'every bloody element in a book' to make it stand out from body text. You do the same operations to assign your personal made-up style, as the predefined semantic style. This argument is rather absurd.

From reading this, I now know that you have no idea what you're talking about. You've obviously never used SCHEMA or XML to make a book, or you'd know that what I've said is correct, and your blithe dismissal is absolutely wrong. If you'd used something like DocBook, to make a book, you'd have a better understanding of this argument. Are there different paragraph classes in HTML, in an eBook? Sure. But the structure is completely different.

In XHTML, structurally, you care about Book-->Sections (if they exist)-->Headings-->Structure if any below headings, eg divs-->Paragraphs-->Spans/words/letters. That's it. In XML, the structure is everything. It has to be, by definition, very rigid, to do what you want it to. (Although, ironically, XML was supposed to be somewhat fluid by design.) You have the ability, in XHTML, to use a given class of paragraph style to suit multiple situations; you don't do that in XML.

Just ONE example; a reference page, let's say. See this for a simple example--this is just a reference page, mind you: http://www.docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/...ex-samprefpage

There is NOTHING simple about using XML to format books for epublishing, particularly as they become more complex. One of the posters here mentioned that he writes his books in DocBook--but he's a programmer. Why don't you ask him what he thinks about making it an industry standard, not merely for people who understand code, but for the million-plus authors out there, who can't even manage Word?

Why should we use a DocBook when we make books, not computer documentation?

If you don't realize that DocBook is exactly what you're talking about, you're even less well-informed than already realized. Why are you persisting in thinking that the wheel has to be reinvented? DocBook is right there, ready for you to make yourself happy.

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Because once you stop getting all hung up over what was the motivating factor behind the invention of DocBook, you will discover that it meets all of your defined specifications.

Exactly.

Hitch