I was thinking of writing something longer than a blog-entry. Thousand-word essays are all well and good, but they're also pretty disposeable, and I feel the need to stretch my legs.
Anyway, to do this, I must pick a format. I want an open format, naturally, but I also want to be able to publish to both PDF and HTML. I want the PDF to look professional, but I don't want the HTML to look like ass. Which leaves me in a bit of a bind.
| Format | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| XHTML |
|
|
| Docbook |
|
|
| TeX |
|
|
It seems that I might be best off writing Docbook using LyX, but while I trust that tool because it's generated nice TeX documents for me before, will it do the same with XML? With LyX/TeX, I was only ever worried about the output, the source was opaque to me. The Docbook route would require me to worry a lot more about the source.
Bother.
Use simplified Docbook, which is a stripped down docbook DTD. Very useful.
\section{Introduction}
I wrote my thesis in \LaTeX, and it worked very well for me. it's just like writing HTML source directly, except the formating tags are less bulky.
\subsection{Advantages}
It's incredibly easy to write things like footnotes and mathematical equations, and your document comes out looking \emph{very} professional. I also find that the tags fit into my thought process quite well, so they don't get in the way of my writing.
% something else i like was the ability to
% put comments directly in the source of
% my document.
It's also platform independent (just editing raw text) which was a big plus at uni with limited computing resources, but probably not so much of an issue for you.
\subsection{Disadvantages}
Well, as you mentioned, HTML output isn't the priority of TeX tool developers. But I imagine now that web people are focusing on the using the "holy trilogy" approach to document creation (content/structure/formatting) that TeX would fit in much better. (it theoretically should be a snap to convert \TeX source to HTML and then apply a stylesheet the same way a \TeX document has a document class applied.
\section{Conclusion}
Personally, i think your best bet is \LaTeX. But \smallcaps{YMMV}.
Our sysadmin swears by AsciiDoc (http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/) that I showed him. I haven't used it yet, but he generates HTML and DocBook from them and is very happy with the output.