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Originally Posted by SerialAeon
My question is: does an ideal universal format exists?
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The answer is, clearly, no. At least, not until 'ideal' has been suitably defined.
The
Text Encoding Initiative is mainly for scholarly uses, and that may seem off-putting. It's mainly a base, suitable for novels and other types of texts, to which special markup (line and page identification, speaker identification, emendations, etc.) added on top.
Early versions were based on SGML, but I believe there is (or has been) an effort to convert to XML. There's no major difference on the markup level, though I believe there are on the DTD-level.
Check out their Guidelines -- and be sure to start with TEI Lite. But you *do* need an XML environment to work in, and particularly one that does check your files for markup errors.
If you want to have a more extensive example of a marked-up file than those that appear in the TEI Lite Introduction, try the
Oxford Text Archive: their preferred formats are TEI-based. Their web site seems heavily frame-based, so I won't give a link, but you may look for works by Anthony Trollope -- I've just verified that the first one listed (Ayala's Angel) uses TEI Lite markup.