[pdurrant]

You should take a look at the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and especially TEI Lite

http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml
http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/Cust...Lite/index.xml

Don't re-invent the XML wheel. I suspect TEI Lite will do all you wanted to do. There's some good documentation:

http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei...ilite.doc.html

For conversion of your documents to other formats, you should be looking at XSLT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSLT where by use of an XSLT template, you can convert from an XML document into any other kind of document.

Originally Posted by Jamp

Hi all, no this is not yet another thread about scifi uber format made by nonprogrammer to be never specified, nor coded. I will do it on my own (hopefully), but I want to be sure i am not reinventing the wheel.

My idea basically is that there is bad way of todays formating of ebooks.
Everyone tried converting books and everyone had problems, because formats are too specific. I want technically return to pre-css ages, with XML-based format that gives you set of basic tags to format ebook. Customization and f.e. re-flow will be done client-side, using some css-like file. This is where HTML basically was, but due to much bigger monitor flexibility, css files became very powerful, and too specific, so its now problem to convert book to smaller device. Similarity can be found in every other format, starting in post-script (but its purpose was to be specific) and ending anywhere (maybe excluding plain text).

So, my plan is to make XML-based, hand-editable, opensource, open specification very simple format, and some basic converters. I want just to know that there is not something like it, so I could just help it.

Hope someone understood.