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.

Pros and Cons

Format	Pros	Cons
XHTML	Readily convertible into other things Very familiar, won't get in the way of writing	Limited vocabulary. No footnotes (which I write a lot of), no way to reference numbered floats (e.g. tables and figures). As such, the printable version would be substandard.
Docbook	Easily convertible into other things Designed for this sort of task	I would have to learn it. I've got the O'Reilly reference, and it all looks very fiddly Unfamiliarity would get in the way of writing
TeX	Makes very good printed output While I don't know TeX itself, LyX is a very capable WYSIWYM editor that I've used in the past	While utilities exist to convert TeX or PDF back to HTML, I've never seen one that didn't make the HTML output look like an afterthought.

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.