Re: nwalsh and XML vs SGML [Fwd: First Open Source Documentation Summit at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention]

[Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@canada.com>]

>>>>> "D" == Dan York <dyork@linuxcare.com> writes:

    D> Was he suggesting it just to get out of all the tags in
    D> DocBook?  It doesn't seem to me that using XML really solves
    D> any issues. If anything, the rigid case-sensitivity (all tags
    D> must be lowercase) just seems to add another issue.

He means DocBook/XML because (see my earlier posting today) the next
generation of tools will be XML based.  Already, XML is required for
using the Website DTD and other nifty gadgets for munging DocBook.

His comment about it being easy to port documents is _precisely_ what
we've all been shouting about these past four months: When content is
seperated from presentation, the content is immune to shifts in the
presentation technology.  Conceptually, technical and software
documents have not changed their structural requirements in 30 years
(since the invention of structured programming), but now we want the
flexibility of XML for data interchange.  To change a DocBook from
SGML to XML really means adding the XML type declaration to the top,
and then (the nasty part) getting out of the bad habit of section
markers.

Now, the translation stage is where it gets weird.  Our ldp.dsl is
thrown to the scrap heap with the Atari and openjade becomes a thing
of the past (I believe) ... in fact, it is not clear to me just how
you do the presentation stage in XML; all I know is that it requires
XSL stylesheets which superficially look exactly like XML files
(because they are) and that confuses the H out of me already. I've
been avoiding that can of worms as much as possible proving once again
that if you snooze in this business, you lose in this business.

BTW: If you think DocBook has lots of tags, check out NewsML ;) You'd
think a newswire would be an easy thing to tag, but let me tell you,
it makes DocBook DTD look like a tea party, and there is no friendly
Norm Walsh to help you along.

-- 
Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@linux.ca>: office voice/fax: 01 519 4222723
TCI - Business Innovations through Open Source : http://www.teledyn.com
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