Janina, Couple of quick remarks... Nothing personal, or course. <grin> On Fri, 14 Jun 2002 11:37:00 -0400 (EDT), Janina wrote: > Perhaps, but it lacks one very salient ingrediant. It doesn't > have community consensus as W3C html does. Community consensus on w3html? Really? If that's the case, how come some web site will refuse access to users who do not have "Internet Explorer version xxx or better?". Let's face it, with over 95%+ market share, Windows is *the* desktop standard and Internet Explorer *the* browser standard most webmasters code *for*. Don't have Internet Explorer? Using lynx on a Linux machine perhaps? Then you are out of luck... And I believe this has happened to you, and to many others on this mailing list. w3html is a standard. But, since Windows is *the* standard on personal computers, Microsoft has de facto been able to set what *it* wants to be the standard, as far as html is concerned. Of course, webmasters worth their salt know how to "degrade" their nice web sites to fit all browsers -- but a lot just don't bother, as we all know. > And, as has been noted, the only accessible authoring tools > which produce RTF are on Windows. Untrue. If you all you want is to use RTF as a simple "text processor" file format, there are tools available on Linux, such as "AFT" (http://www.maplefish.com/todd/aft.html) that can produce acceptable RTF from a text file, and on the command line, to boot. No X Windows! Of course, if you want to use the many functions RTF files have to offer, in terms of structured information, you are out of luck, of course... One tidbit of information: Windows help files (before Windows 98 and the switch to compressed html) used to be created with RTF files, including some really weird hypertext markers, and a parser called RoboHelp. Ugliest, most convoluted format I ever worked with... But the result was acceptable. > So, I'm disappointed by > Book Share on this point. Understood. And agreed. But, again, Microsoft market share rules. Book Share, like many other "greedy" corporations, is probably not going to care much. > Perhaps it generates better looking text. But, I don't believe > RTF supports structure quite markup anywhere as well as html > does. Frankly, if you want advanced structured markup, use SGML, not the limited subset of SGML that is used by the www. HTML, compared to SGML, is incredibly primitive and simple. Which is why it's so great (but I digress)... > Since Book Share supports DAISY, at least in theory, it > would seem that structural markup should win out over good looks. I am sorry? Since when intelligence has been more important than good looks? <grin> Sorry if this sounds very cynical, but, frankly, this debate has been hashed and re-hashed in countless flame wars. The end result is always the same: go with what is most popular. Meaning...? Good looks, of course! Sad, but oh so true. Most people will take the convenience of nice, properly-formatted RTF file over the simpler, plainer, less "cute" HTML file. Just my US$ 0.02... Feel free to disagree with my idiotic opinions, of course. And don't take any of this too seriously. <grin> Oh, and have a nice and sunny week-end! -- Gil Andre gandre@arkeia.com Technical Writer Arkeia Corp. http://www.arkeia.com