Message dated: 06 Aug 2000 18:52:18 +0300
>
> Yes, I thought hard what format to choose and my ideal goal
> was eventually to use SGML (later DocBook). But then it sounded so
> much alike as what Emacs developers preferred, the info-format,
> Hm, erm.
>
> The source of my inconvenience for all "generators" out there is that
> you have to learn the language syntax first and use the markup it
> provides.
>
> I truly hate markup, because it means I have to edit the document by
> hand adding markup here and there to control the layout. I wanted to
> read it "as is" and format "as is" without any markup, or as little
> markup as possible.
Well, wait a minute, "control the layout" is decidedly _not_ what
DocBook (and, typically, other SGML/XML markup languages) is designed
to do. It provides additional _semantic_ tagging for text.
Consider DocBook's <QandASet> tag, which is specifically intended for
FAQs. A FAQ marked up using these tags can not only be turned into
plain text and/or nice PDF and/or HTML by the application of a
suitable style sheet, but other applications can produce outlines or
indexes of the questions, or locate and index glossary or other terms
that are marked up with <firstterm> or <glossterm>, and so on -- even
if these are not typographically distinguishable in the text or HTML
versions. The assumption is that this will make the document more
useful for (hypothetical) future applications than simple text, or
just distinguishing such terms as <Italic>. "Document longevity" is
one of the buzzwords you hear for this.
>
> [sidenote]
> Wheez, I like WORD that hides the internal representation for me,
> but WORD of course is not an option in multi-platform world.
I expect that Word will be able to support and export general XML
(including DocBook) in the not-too-distant future. This might even
make it a useful tool. Micro$oft is very big on XML.
> I also dislike taking diffs oo documents that use markup, because
> they are not so "clear".
With the rapidly spreading deployment of XML, I hope to see tools like
"diff" and "grep" appear that are smarter about markup context and
white space than the current text-line-oriented tools. Heck, Tim Bray
gave a talk about such things at a USENIX conference about ten or
fifteen years ago in connection with the SGML version of the Oxford
English Dictionary, if I recall aright. This is not exactly a new
problem to solve.
> Any markup may scare off any potential readers,
> that know how to send diff files: Currently they can correct
> the plain-text and I have easy time to apply patches to the original.
>
> So, markup is fine if there is known community (Linux DocBook) or the
> author hand-mades the changes, but markup is not encouraging people to
> make documentation changes by tehmselves and pass them to authors in
> diff format.
Again, it would be nice if tools like "patch" existed that could apply
diffs based on a markup context rather than based on lines of text.
Future XML file tools like xmlgrep, xmldiff, xmlpatch, and others
would be a really fine addition to the GNU repertoire. The hard part
would be to come up with a convenient syntax for specifying "grep for
_regexp_ in all <para> elements" or something.
>
> I agree that DocBook is good, but Hm, Eh, you know, people are lazy,
> having to install all kind of software that does not work in every
> platform (Does docBook in win32?) is too much trouble sometimes.
Although the XML/XSL stylesheets for DocBook aren't yet ready for
prime time, a fair amount free software to process XML is in Java, and
is pleasantly cross-platform. [Now that the hype over Java has died
down somewhat, it seems to be evolving nicely into something actually
useful].
In short, DocBook and XML aren't quite "there" yet, but are well worth
looking at for the future. http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook is the
URL for the current DocBook.
Mike
(who shouldn't be on this list, since someone else now
maintains the FAQ he used to maintain).
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