Date: Sun, 29 Aug 1999 14:18:37 +0100 From: Nik Clayton <nik@freebsd.org> To: hoek@freebsd.org Cc: Nik Clayton <nik@freebsd.org>, freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: DocBook formatting style? Message-ID: <19990829141837.B75050@catkin.nothing-going-on.org> In-Reply-To: <19990828103736.C49983@ppp18415.on.bellglobal.com>; from Tim Vanderhoek on Sat, Aug 28, 1999 at 10:37:36AM -0400 References: <19990823172005.C42397@ppp18344.on.bellglobal.com> <19990824172812.L65430@kilt.nothing-going-on.org> <199908250049.JAA00382@rei.snipe.rim.or.jp> <19990825115510.A96398@kilt.nothing-going-on.org> <19990825194348.G18970@ppp18415.on.bellglobal.com> <19990826111447.C66300@kilt.nothing-going-on.org> <19990826141141.F24968@futuresouth.com> <19990827105043.A15526@kilt.nothing-going-on.org> <19990828145129.A5750@catkin.nothing-going-on.org> <19990828103736.C49983@ppp18415.on.bellglobal.com>
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On Sat, Aug 28, 1999 at 10:37:36AM -0400, Tim Vanderhoek wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 28, 1999 at 02:51:29PM +0100, Nik Clayton wrote:
> >
> > problem above. And, with an eye to the future, while we're not using XML
> > now, I wouldn't be surprised if it played a much more significant role in
> > our documentation tool set in 12-18 months time.
>
> What are the advantages of XML?
Everyone's using it, basically. XML is SGML with bits cut out of it, to
make it easier to write parsers for, so that those parsers can then be
embedded in to web browsers. You can, currently, convert SGML documents
to equivalent XML documents mechanically -- if you've got Jade installed
then take a look at 'sx', and /usr/local/share/doc/jade/sx.html.
XML has different formatting mechanisms than SGML -- SGML has DSSSL, which
is a (lisp|scheme) like language, an implementation of which is in Jade.
XML has XSL, the XML Style Language, which is used to produce formatted
output for things like Postscript, and XSLT, the XML Style Transformation
Language, which is used to transform documents from one DTD to another
(e.g., transformaing a DocBook document to an HTML document).
Parsers for either of these formatting languages are still in their
infancy, and most of them are written in Java. I'm trying to scrounge
the time to experiment with lotusxsl (it's in the ports tree) and a Python
implemented Palm Pilot Document XML stylesheet -- the idea being that you
could convert from DocBook straight to an XML implementation of the Palm
Pilot documentation format, and then convert this to the Pilot Document
format -- another approach (see the recent PR, which I'll be committing
shortly) is to go from DocBook -> HTML -> Text -> pilot-makedoc. Somewhat
more convoluted, but it works out of the box now.
We currently use some of the things in SGML that aren't in XML (see, for
example, marked sections, in the FDP Primer), so we won't be cutting
over to XML in the near future. However, in the distant future (which
might be a year, 18 months, or 3 years, I don't really know) we may well
switch to XML, depending on the toolset.
Or, we might be able to stick with SGML indefinitely, and when we need to
use XML processing tools we run our docs through 'sx' (or an equivalent
program) first. This is really too far off to be able to make accurate
predictions.
N
--
[intentional self-reference] can be easily accommodated using a blessed,
non-self-referential dummy head-node whose own object destructor severs
the links.
-- Tom Christiansen in <375143b5@cs.colorado.edu>
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