I'm on an extended blog break, so I'll respond here. Feel free to post some
or all.
You're *almost* right in your post on why we need XML editors. You say:
"The high priests of XML want us to think about structure directly (this
section should be H1 or H2), when most humans think in formatting (18 point
font vs 9 point)."
In addition to structure, the XML priests care about *semantics*. It's the
difference between saying "this is bold", which has no real meaning, and
saying "this should be emphasized" or "this is a keyword", which does have
meaning. Structure is important because you can logically nest content.
In XML you can say "This is a section in a chapter." In word you have to
say "This line is in bold 24pt arial, then there's some text, then there's a
line in bold 20pt Arial and then some more regular text." In HTML it's a
*little* better, but it's still not semantically rich: "This is a <div> with
a <h1> in it for my chapter, and then there's another <div> inside that with
an <h2> for the title."
You also say:
"It's because this separation exists that you can copy and past a column
from Excel into Word as either plain text, formatted text, a table, or an
actual Excel object."
I'm no expert in how this work, but I don't think you're 100% correct here.
I believe that the reason you can copy and paste between Office applications
is that they all use the same pseudomarkup that controls formatting. It
would be extremely hard to copy from word into an XML application and have a
bold word in the text turn into something meaningful, and vice versa.
Chris
PS As an addendum to my post on Epic, I wanted to say that the reason we
don't offer Epic as the end-all for XML editing is that we're not an XML
editor compahy; we're a multichannel publishing and content services company
that uses XML as the underlying technology. Or at least, that's what the
marketers tell me :).
