Re: [Tools-arch] Document Production Methods

[John Levine <[e-mail]>]

In article <[e-mail]> you write:
>That's a fair summary.
>
>I would say however that you might be overstating the XML thing.  Those who designed the v3 format might believe
>that it is all needed, but I am less certain of the value of it all.  What is true is that this is what we have.

I think we underestimated how hard it is to do automated typsetting
that produces good looking results so we ended up with a whole lot of
very complex tagging to let people say in great detail how they want
things to look. We also put in a lot of semantic tags, e.g., this is a
picture, that is sourcecode, this other thing is someone's name, which
may be useful for future automated processing but we don't know yet.

>What I think is important to preserve across conversions is the text.

One of the few things that XML makes simple is to tell what is a tag
and what is text.

R's,
John