On Mon, 24 May 2010 11:50:41 -0700 (PDT)
faenvie <fanny.aen...@gmx.de> wrote:
> hello mike,
> hello tim
>
> thank you for this detailed insights into your experience
> and knowledge.
>
> lately i had to implement a generator for a big catalog of
> products and i used docbook for it, but that was not a
> satisfying experience at all. docbook locks you into
> its predefined document-structures and is difficult to
> customize - i really hate this old fashioned xslt stuff.
> i believe, that the amount of incidental complexity in my
> application is unreasonably high because of docbook.
Doesn't surprise me - docbook is a single application of the idea, and
meant for technical documents. You want a system that lets you start
with nearly arbitrary schema. I suspect that docbook might be suitable
as a format to produce for such a system. Then again, it might not.
I find the reference to "old fashioned xslt" amusing, considering that
how new it is. Or maybe how old I am. Of course, part of the point of
XML is that you have a wide variety of tools to pick from for working
with it; xslt is just one of them. I've had good experiences just
adding an xpath library to a good language. A clojure xpath library
that returned result sets as lazy sequences sounds like a really cool
way to do this, though that would again be just a single component in
such a system.
On the topic of literate programming - that seems sort of tangential
to what you have in mind. The kind of tool we're talking about should
be good for producing many types of documents, including literate
programs. A literate programming tool on the other hand only has to
deal with one type of document - literate programs. So while such a
tool might well be everything you're looking for, it might also wind
up being as stifling when dealing with documents outside of it's
intended domain as docbook is. For example, Tim mentioned using
comments as being one way to do literate programming, though not very
well. They are clearly even less suitable for other types of
documents.
I don't think this should cut the other way - being able to extract
just the executable parts of a literate program and feed them to the
language processor in the order it wants (the "tangle" command) seems
like an excellent litmus test for flexibility in such a system.
<mike
--
Mike Meyer <m...@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.
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