Open eBook Publication Structure

Hi Folks,

Over the past 18 months I've participated in the development of the Open
eBook Publication Structure.  We drew heavily from the great work of the W3C
and built our specification on XML, namespaces, XHTML, CSS1, etc...  We
released it last September.  For details, see http://www.openebook.org/ (or
jump right to the spec at http://www.openebook.org/specification.htm).

The output from tidy is very close to a conforming Open eBook Document, but
it's not quite there.  There are a variety of things, but some of them
include:

	* a desire (usually) to have a particular DOCTYPE/FPI - it'd be nice if
TIDY could stick this in
	* certain (X)HTML tags are deprecated - it'd be nice if tidy could complain
in their presence
	* a subset of CSS is supported - it'd be nice if tidy could complain in the
presence of deprecated stuff
	* we mandate the "extra space before the closing />" for interoperability
with browsers
	* special rules about stylesheets and their MIME media types
	* must not include an internal declaration subset
	* any attribute with a value of NMTOKEN, ID, or IDREF must be a XML name
	* etc.

There's are probably a couple dozen little things like this.  People
constantly ask me what is the easiest way to get content into this OEB
format.  TIDY is a great help, but it'd be great to be telling 100% of the
story instead of 95% when I say "TIDY will create OEB documents for you."
I've been thinking for a while about building some mods to tidy to support
these things (an "-oeb" switch?  perhaps a variety of individual config
options?).

My questions to the list are:

	* What do people think about this idea?
	* Dave, do you ever/typically accept mods to the base source code and
integrate them into the main tidy release or would I be maintaining such
changes in my own version?
	* Might anybody else be interested in such a beast?

David

___________________________________________________________
David Ornstein, CTO, NuvoMedia, Inc.

AIM: dbo666 voice: 650-314-1200 web: http://www.nuvomedia.com/
PGP Public Key Available at: ldap://certserver.pgp.com

"An honest man is able to speak for himself, when a knave is not."
Shakespeare, King Henry VI., Part 2

Received on Tuesday, 9 May 2000 22:24:53 UTC