From owner-freebsd-doc Fri Jun 7 05:31:45 1996 Return-Path: owner-doc Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id FAA11504 for doc-outgoing; Fri, 7 Jun 1996 05:31:45 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mailbox.neosoft.com (mailbox.neosoft.com [206.109.1.16]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id FAA11498 for ; Fri, 7 Jun 1996 05:31:43 -0700 (PDT) Received: from bonkers.taronga.com (root@bonkers.neosoft.com [206.109.2.48]) by mailbox.neosoft.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id HAA24148 for ; Fri, 7 Jun 1996 07:31:34 -0500 (CDT) Received: (from peter@localhost) by bonkers.taronga.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id HAA19807; Fri, 7 Jun 1996 07:32:01 -0500 Date: Fri, 7 Jun 1996 07:32:01 -0500 From: peter@taronga.com (Peter da Silva) Message-Id: <199606071232.HAA19807@bonkers.taronga.com> To: doc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Linuxdoc Newsgroups: taronga.freebsd.doc In-Reply-To: <199606061652.SAA03920@allegro.lemis.de> References: Organization: none Sender: owner-doc@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk >We need to discuss that statement. I don't see that it's true. Sure, >each file should have only one kind of format, but the individual >files could have different formats. At the moment, we have one of at >least three possible transformations: .sgml->.html, .sgml->.tex, >.sgml->.mm (or whatever). What we need to do is to agree on a >different file name extension for the DocBook or the latexdoc stuff >(say, change .sgml to .ldoc for the latexdoc stuff), and then we have >three additional transformations .ldoc->.html, .ldoc->.tex, >.ldoc->.mm. This is rather like what I'm doing in the latest version >of my book, in which I have .ms, .man and .tex files. I recommend that none of the file formats be named ".sgml". That's sort of like naming your C files ".src" or ".txt", right? All three (latexdoc, docbook, and html) are SGML DTDs. To support this, on the Amiga there were a family of file formats called IFF. Some programs decided to call their SMUS (simple musical score) or ILBM (interleaved bitmap) files ".iff" because the PC versions of their programs didn't like 4-character suffixes. As a result you ended up with a bunch of files all called ".iff". This wasn't as bad as all that, because the programmers who did that also tended to ship programs that didn't work well on the Amiga for similar reasons, but until they all went out of business the confusion was annoying. So, how about naming the files at the semantic level rather than the structural...