Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterT
Just wondering how on earth you expect to force all creators to follow any proposed rules? People can't even follow advice on how to correctly use STYLES in Word documents??
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Amen, brother.
Only those of us who labor over OPB (Other People's Books) all day know just how absurd it is to think that people will actually obey ANY effing schema.
My take--after however many posts--is that Sarmat wants to tag every element in a book with XML. Period. NO styling. Then the reader (the person) can attach styling elements as s/he sees fit. Basically, books wouldn't look like books, in their "final" form; they'd look like big honking XML documents, and the device would then interpret the semantic markup into the layout preferred by the human reader. And here's my response to that idea:
There are so many issues with that that my head spins. What if the reader doesn't like the default layout that would have to be created by the device manufacturer? Does s/he then have to go into some other settings program, and muck around endlessly to figure out how to change it? Am I the only one that sees the hilarity in that? Sure, WE would all do it in a heartbeat, but Sally Reader? Bob Boyfriend? Gimme a damn break.
@eschwartz: even though I've certainly done it--we ALL have--the nbsp contained inside paragraph tags is
definitely not kosher. Dag's point, I think, is that
there really is no instance in which that specific usage is correct, because a paragraph, by definition, is intended to contain text--not a space. Sticking solely to the specifics, that would be correct.
Not that that actually adds weight to Sarmat's argument; the same people that format books now using the ubiquitous <p> </p> will do something similar in XML. After all, how hard is it to create a clip for <simpara> </simpara>? Same s**t, different day.
The OP, Sarmat, wants everything in XML, so that he can search on arcane information to his heart's content. To be able to do that, he wants to impose an extremely rigid form of XML on book creators. That all sounds great (not), but the bottom line is, as I said in my lengthy post on the topic: the millions of books created by folks uploading Word files won't conform to that. Given that that's a huge piece of the action, neither Amazon nor B&N nor anyone else will force them to change that. Moreover, that would require such a greater amount of knowledge to do right (using the "right" xml tags for everything) that it would put a massive dent in self-publishing. NOT to mention, the huge cost to convert all existing eBooks to meet the criteria.
Honestly, the whole thing is daft. It's pie in the sky, even if we all loved it. That's the irony of this thread.
It doesn't matter if Sarmat convinces ALL of us that it's the best idea since sliced bread; he has to convince the DC folks, plus Amazon plus Barnes & Noble, plus Apple, plus...well, you get my drift. This is an even bigger exercise in futility than usual.
Hitch