A last missing link for interoperable representation

[James Kass via Unicode]

David Starner wrote,

 > Can some books be mostly handled with Unicode plain text
 > and italics? Sure. HTML can handle them quite nicely. ...

Yes, many books can be handled very well with HTML using simple 
mark-up.  If I were producing a computer file to reproduce an old 
fiction novel, that's how I'd do it.  Not because it's better or simpler 
than plain text, but because it can't really be done in plain text at 
this time.  But if a section of the text is copy/pasted from the screen 
into an editor, some of the original information may be lost.

As you point out, there's a lot of published material best viewed 
digitally as full color page scans.  As it should be.  That seems 
unlikely to change.