On Thu, 13 Nov 2003, Richard Bos wrote: > While updating the documentation I come across some strange looking sgml and > I'm wundering and want to learn why that is, e.g. <command/apt-cdrom/ were I > expect: <command>apt-cdrom</command>.
This is valid SGML, it's called short tags IIRC. I finally went and look what is up with this today, and the answer is that the Debian mantainer of the docbook package has opted to disable the DTDDECL file that comes with docbook. The default file disables all the markup minimization features that are used in the APT SGML documents. So, the documents are not valid according to the DTD that Oasis publishes which is why they don't validate on your suse box. See the file debian/README.docbook.dcl in the docbook source package for the explanation. I think a patch to correct the docbook SGML documents is probably a good idea. I don't know of any tool that will normalize the markup without mangling the indentation in the document. sgmlnorm (run on a system with the mangled DTDTYPE) will remove all tag minimization (and also expand entities, etc), but the resulting output is too mangled to be useful. Jason
