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Re: XML vs DocBooks

On 24 Sep 99, at 8:07, Doug Loss wrote:

> Even if there wasn't a DocBook XML DTD, shouldn't you be able to
> convert from DocBook to XML if your program (sgmltools) can do so?

SGMLtools can't (AFAIR), since what it does is convert the SGML into 
other formats. Which of course leads to the fact that yes, it could 
be converted to any other DTD (SGML or XML for that matter) with the 
appropriate stylesheets. Of course creating the stylesheets is a 
nother matter entirely ;).

> 
> One thing I noticed about DocBook is how rich it is in possibilities.
> We should probably come up with a subset of DocBook tags to use so
> that our HOWTOs come out similar to each other.  Otherwise they may
> appear unrelated in their structure, which might be confusing to our
> intended audience.

A certain basic format would be good, or a template of a document. 
Also trying to find the appropriate tag helps alot. (When using SGML 
you do have to stop thinking of I want courier so I'll just use a tag 
that gives me courier and think of the meaning of the tag. This is 
something that is important in creating the documents.) Otherwise 
trying to create a subset might prove harmful, since we need the 
HOWTOs for many different purposes and they need to use different 
tags. The semantics should not be forgotten!

ramin
Ramin Miraftabi           Student Computer Science
ramin@cs.joensuu.fi       University of Joensuu
http://dawn.joensuu.fi    Joensuu, Finland

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