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Old 11-07-2006, 02:09 AM   #3
Jon Noring
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Jon, my biggest concern would be how well this tool could adapt to changing format standards (or how they were used by the end-user) over time. And with multiple formats to be concerned about, any little change in one of a half-dozen formats (or how an e-reader reads them) could require major rewriting of the tool.
Thanks, Steve, for your feedback.

I think there is a breakdown of communication somewhere (maybe what I wrote in my 3 original articles was not clear. If not, I apologize.)

It is very important to note that the authoring tool will use a specialized and standardized XML vocabulary specifically designed for mastering "simple" books and with universal (or hopefully universal) conversion in mind. Note importantly the word "mastering". The output of the tool will be a master XML document, not any of the target ebook formats. Then secondary modules will convert the master XML into other ebook formats, hopefully with little human interaction. These modules are, technically speaking, separate from the master authoring tool.

Now, this means three things:

First, the vocabulary MUST be purely structurally-based and must NOT be extensible to any significant extent. No presentation-oriented markup at all. So one identifies the structures of the book, not how it is to be displayed (which is ebook format-specific anyway). Since the markup is standardized to a "tee", this means, for each output ebook format, that a public archive of CSS style sheets can be assembled over time, allowing the publisher to pick the styling they want on output (and they are certainly allowed to tweak the CSS for their needs and add that to the public archive if they wish.)

Second, this authoring tool will NOT, and cannot, do all ebook types. Can't be done without building a gawd-awfully complex vocabulary like DocBook or full-blown TEI that makes it essentially unusuable by the average small publisher. The markup vocabulary is intended to do simpler types of books like fiction. I hope it'll achieve the 80-20 or even 90-10 rule for smaller publishers who tend, overall, to publish pretty simple books. In some cases the publishers may curse and swear that the tool won't structure their documents as they'd like, but then again this tool cannot be all things to all people. For the more complex books, the publisher will have to do something different, such as hire someone to do it right, or do it in the current ad-hoc ways, like using Word (and most don't use Word properly, either.)

(But it is hoped that this "Simple Book" tool and associated vocabulary will accomplish two things: help most publishers publish most of their books with simple pushbutton operation, and to spur the development of alternative tools and vocabularies that may do more in the future. Once publishers get used to this tool and gain a basic understanding of what's under the hood, most will be able to graduate to a next level tool which can do more complex things. Ideally, I'm hoping publishers will graduate to being able to markup books in a text editor, since that is quick once one learns how to do it. With a purely structural markup, it is actually quite easy to markup books, much easier than doing web sites.)

Third, when a new output ebook format comes along (hopefully the world will settle on OpenReader!), a module will be built to take the master XML format produced by the authoring tool and convert it to that new format.

A final note. Some people say we should use either some subset of TEI or DocBook for this master XML format since conversion tools already exist to convert those to other things. However, after evaluating the needs and requirements for the master vocabulary and the authoring tool (which I won't go into here), it doesn't look like using TEI or DocBook is the best approach (both vocabularies carry too much unnecessary baggage for what we want to do.) However, what many don't realize is that the master vocabulary will be easily convertable, if needed, to either DocBook or TEI, which then can enter into those already-developed conversion processes.

I hope the above clarifies things.
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