Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
I was thinking about this last night, and got to the same point, that if you are marking up display rather than semantics, then something simple like markdown is really all you need, at least for standard text. If I could have all my ebooks in markdown, and have readers read that, it would be greatly preferable to the current situation, where I never know how any given book will render until I actually transfer it to the reader.
|
Yes. I still see the need for specialized DTD's/schemas including TEI. For instance if I were an academic marking up a classic literary text in fine detail, so that it could be searched, parsed, collated, and compared with other texts in painstaking detail, I'd definitely consider something like TEI, or a subset of DocBook, as the source authoring scheme. And then use transforms to output to whatever format is needed, mostly likely PDF, HTML5, and yes, epub. Ok, and Mobi too.
But...if just authoring modern content...especially ordinary prose, I'd think it would save authors so much hassle to just author against a very simple, minimalist schema, or even use something like markdown, which is even more simple and lightweight than using HTML5. ETA, here's an interesting write-up on using markdown for book authoring:
http://ianhocking.com/2013/06/22/wri...sing-markdown/