@vertigo If you're familiar with #PaulOtlet, "document" is pretty much any fixed record: texts, images, audio, video, multimedia, data, software.

For publishing --- looking at texts, I'm thinking along the lines of a Kolmogorov complexity or minimum requisite complexity for a given work --- how much specification is required to create a sufficiently complete representation. I'm leaning heavily to Markdown and LaTeX as primary formats. (Possibly other lightweight markup langs, e.g., asciidoc or reStructured text).

Notion of having a source from which multiple endpoints might be produced: straight text, HTML, ePub, PDF, etc.