Joe Clark on web standards and work­flows for e-books in the latest A List Apart:

The canonical format of a book should be HTML. Authors should write in HTML, making a manu­script imme­di­ately trans­formable to an E-book [sic]. A manu­script could then be imported into that fossil the pub­lishing industry refuses to leave behind, Microsoft Word.

Yes yes yes, a thousand times yes. This should have started hap­pening about five years ago. (The section from which this quote is taken is about halfway through the article.)

HTML is a pretty good lan­guage for describing the con­tents of a book (it would be even better if it had a decent way of cap­tioning images) — and in my opinion it’s easy enough to learn that authors (or the editor, or pro­duction manager) could render the first draft as a machine-readable doc­ument at the beginning of the pro­duction process, rather than at the end.

I also learned some­thing new reading this piece: namely, that Unicode has a spe­cific­ation for dif­ferent width spaces. Colour me the colour of a person who has just found out some­thing they didn’t pre­vi­ously know.