[Pipet Devel] Docbook online

[hinsen at dirac.cnrs-orleans.fr]

> > HTML and LaTeX in Python using DOM. But if I had to do it again, I'd
> > design my own specialized DTD.
> 
> Hmmm.  Are you saying that if started from scratch, you would use DocBook
> + your own DTD.  Or are you saying you would not use DocBook at all?

For my needs (lots of library documentation with little else) I'd
not use DocBook at all. It's just terribly complicated in areas that
I don't need. For applications where much of the DocBook tags could
be used profitable, DocBook + extensions might be fine.

However, it should be clear that once you modify DocBook (including
additions), you lose many of its benefits. None of the standard tools
will understand your private DTD, for example. Extending DSSSL
stylesheets is possible in principle, but I suspect it's about as easy
to write a whole new typesetting system. So the only reason to keep
anything of DocBook if you need modifications anyway is to be able to
use many of its tags.

> What would be the _next_ "best" thing to DocBook?

What does "best" mean? If you accept that no DTD can be used without
modifications, then I'd go for the simplest DTD possible. Perhaps
the old LinuxDoc DTD. Or the simplified subset of DocBook. But
in any case, it could turn out to be as easy to design a DTD from
scratch. In the long run, I expect that an approach based on many
small standard DTDs will evolve, using XML namespaces. But we aren't
there yet.

Konrad.
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Konrad Hinsen                            | E-Mail: hinsen at cnrs-orleans.fr
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