Michael A Nachbaur wrote:
I've been thinking the same thing myself. I have tried many different
document types for my writing, starting with MS Word and now writing
plain text in VIM (using standard text nomenclature, with a custom perl
script to convert it to HTML). This is for my Sci-Fi writing.
Since I started working on my programming reference book, I've adopted
DocBook. I too have come to the conclusion that it would work
wonderfully for my fiction writing as well.
However, I believe adopting additional tags for different genres of
writing can only lead to madness and perdition. For instance, "spell",
"magicitem", none of those tags have any place in my form of writing.
Instead, terms like "scienceterm", "technology" and "stellarbody" would
be more appropriate. I'm not recommending that these tags be adopted
however, since the vast number of writing styles would overwhelm.
Instead, my plan is to use <emphasis> et al as one normally would
in HTML, but use the "role" attribute to clarify what I intend. I can
then extend my XSL stylesheet to understand these appropriately. I
even think it would be interesting to create a glossary of terms for
technologies et al that I describe in my book.
I've used this approach in a novel I'm writing using the "role"
attribute to, for example, affect how sections are displayed
("role=scene" prints a centered row of stars at the end of the
section), display an entire blockquote with emphasis, and a few other
things.
I actually added "prologue" and "epilogue" elements based on the
chapter element (I wanted "Prologue" and "Epilogue" rather than
"Chapter nn."), but that was before I hit on the "role" thing. It
might be possible to use that instead, but I haven't tried it.
Does anyone else have any feelings on the subject? Any personal /
practical experience someone would like to impart?
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