On Fri, 07 May 1999 10:14:00 +0200, "Pahle, Morten Gleditsch"
<pahle@iway.fr> wrote:
> Has anyone done this? I mean, does anyone maintain their FAQ in
> SGML Format? (Is there a FAQ DTD?)
The FAQs-about-FAQs site used to have a link to the AmiTCP FAQ which
was done in this way. Last time I looked, it was very much a homegrown
system with various pieces of quick and dirty scripts and duct tape to
keep the thing together (pardon the tone). To my surprise, the URL I
have for this still works, but the web page talks about HTML 2.0 so it
probably hasn't been updated in quite a while. [1]
One early FAQ DTD was developed when SGML was still a fairly new and
zippy thing but I don't think I have seen it used for Usenet FAQs
(presumably there was no conversion software that produced plaintext
suitable for posting). [Apparently this is the very same DTD which is
used in the AmiTCP FAQ.] [2]
There is the SGMLtools (nee Linuxdoc, nee qwertz) suite of tools but
it is only available for Unix I think, and also suffers a bit of the
"duct tape" syndrome. Earlier incarnations were implemented by people
who did not IMHO possess a good grasp of SGML concepts, i.e. there
were all sorts of presumptions about the target format(s) and the type
of content you were supposed to create. (This could have changed; it
seemed the new maintainers who took it from Linuxdoc to SGMLtools were
aware of these problems. Haven't looked recently, though.) [3]
Probably you could do something based on the DocBook DTD but I don't
think there are production-quality tools for anything like producing a
simple text-only rendering. I believe this is geared towards heavier
processing (technical publishing etc) and so probably overkill for
your needs. [4]
My humble opinion, after having thought a lot and done very little
experimenting or anything over several years, is that you should not
see SGML as some sort of holy grail. If you find a suite of tools
which suit your needs and work for you, the underlying format doesn't
really matter. If you are the kind of person who is interested in
these sorts of things, chances are that the tools you end up with will
provide a way to produce SGML of some sort among the available target
formats, but SGML in and of itself is a bit too heavy machinery to be
directly useful as your source format (as long as you are doing fairly
simple things).
Perl's POD format is a good example. You can produce half-decent HTML
very easily (there's an SGML DTD for you, although probably not what
you had in mind :-) as well as manual pages, text only, and a variety
of other formats. It's not exactly free of assumtions about what you
might want to do -- quite the opposite, actually -- but it's very easy
to learn and use, and fairly versatile. Randal Schwartz apparently
writes his magazine columns in POD format. :-) [5,6]
There's a format called SDF which is a refinement / development based
on POD which looks rather appealing, but I haven't gotten around to
actually trying it. I believe there are people who are using SDF for
FAQ documents. [7]
> Are there SGML to HTML and SGML to ASCIII (etc.) converters out there
> which can be easily used?
"Easy" as in "click and drool" goes very much against the batch
processing nature of useful SGML conversion tools, but you can
probably create a gooey wrapper if you really crave one using Visual
Basic or something. But "easy" could also mean that once you figure
out how to run a tool with the options you want, you just do that over
and over again. Look ma, no hands.
I wrote this with the standard POD tools in mind; I'm sure there might
actually be prepackaged versions with a GUI tacked on if you look
around a little bit (if that is really what you think you want).
> (And - last but not least) Do any of the necessary tools exist for
> Win95?
I am biased and grumpy, but I would generally expect the situation to
be basically that if a tool is any good, nobody will have bothered to
create a glitzy dumbed-down Windows version. (Pardon the tone again.)
Perl is platform-independent. And you probably wouldn't regret
learning at least a little bit of Perl just as something any good
netizen should have a basic understanding of.
Again, "serious" SGML tools might be overkill. If you have some money
to spend on this, SoftQuad might have e.g. visual editing software
that suits your taste, though. [8]
FWIW, I use my own little extensions to HTML and a homegrown macro
processor to produce the actual web pages. I use lynx (reluctantly) to
produce a text rendering of those, and feed that to yet another little
fixer-upper to get a version suitable for mail and Usenet posting. All
in all it's a few hundred lines of Perl and Make code but there's a
lot there that could be made much simpler.
This methodology isn't WYSIWYG of course (or rather "what you see is
+all+ you get", as LaTeX guru Leslie Lamport put it) so if you're
uncomfortable with working in a text editor, this sort of thing is
probably not for you.
Hope this helps,
/* era */
[1] <http://www.phone.net/ATCPFAQ/FAQ.html> is about the preparation of
the AmiTCP FAQ and which tools are used.
[2] <http://www.phone.net/ATCPFAQ/faq.dtd> -- you can probably find
the original on <ftp://ftp.ifi.uio.no/pub/SGML/> somewhere.
[3] <http://www.sgmltools.org/> -- actually they seem to be doing
their stuff on top of DocBook now.
[4] <http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/docbook/noframes.html> might not
be the greatest starting point but it was the best I could come up
with quickly. I believe O'Reilly are heavy users of DocBook.
[5] Again, can't unfortunately come up with anything better than
<http://www.perl.com/> but you should find scores of copies of the
perlpod manual page on-line (do an Alta Vista search for
+title:perlpod or something ... actually Perl.com is bound to have
a copy of it as well, come to think of it :-)
[6] <http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
[7] <http://www.mincom.com/mtr/sdf/>
[8] <http://www.sq.com/>
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