While researching my primer post on e-book formats, I happened across an interesting article from a month ago by David Skurnik on the DCLnews blog. Skurnik advises publishers on how to “future-proof” their e-books.
Skurnik notes that e-books have only just begun the process of evolving away from their common ancestry with print books into something more complex. Given how many different formats are competing for primacy, it is difficult to know which horse to back, or indeed whether (or how) to back all of them.
To stay prepared for whatever e-book formats win, or whatever new e-book formats appear down the road, Skurnik suggests the intermediary stop of converting books into a generic XML format that can then be converted directly to any or all formats of your choice. Even when a new standard comes along, he suggests, it will probably still retain enough backward compatibility with XML to make conversion simple.
He goes on to suggest a few possible XML standards, including NLM, DocBook, TEI Lite, and DITA.
I don’t believe this will happen, because this generic XML format will have to convey all the semantics of current document languages and maintain this forever.
Since XML lets you define the format you are using for a particular document/database, you can update the format simply by tweaking the .xsd file. No need to redo everything else. XML doesn’t lock you into one format.