At 23:47 2002 06 24 +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote: >Norman Walsh writes: > >> Fork 2: Do It Our Way OR Do It the XLink Way >> >> If we do it our way, we get to define the semantics, but no tool will >> ever support our linking elements directly. (Well, I suppose some >> special purpose DocBook tool might, but let's not worry about that.) > >I'm wondering how such "direct" support would look like. All toolsets >that work with DocBook are in some way specially purposed for DocBook. >Today we have XSLT and DSSSL stylesheets (and other obscure conversion >tools) that work specially with DocBook. Even in the unforeseeable future >there will have to be some sort of tool that associates semantics to raw >DocBook. For such a tool it's pretty irrelevant whether it converts xlink >or some other linking system for presentation.
I find this comment interesting. I have a different perspective. (Bias disclosure: my company has developed SGML and XML editors and composition systems for almost 20 years.) I see DocBook as another DTD (or XML vocabulary). An XML Editor and/or composition system should be able to handle DocBook like "just another DTD." There should be no reason for a special DocBook tool. You mention stylesheets for DocBook, but a generalized XML editor can take any stylesheet (written in a supported standard stylesheet language) and apply it to any DTD. There is nothing special about DocBook. Applying non-style-related semantics is less standardized (unless you talk about writing DOM code), but there really is very little non-style-related semantics associated with DocBook right now in general. Any given person/company/application may have special semantics they wish to associate with DocBook, but of course that's specialized to that person/company/application and aren't going to be supported in a "DocBook tool" anyway (except one written specifically for that person/company/application's needs). So I don't see anything that requires a special DocBook tool right now. Linking is, in fact, one of the first steps in this direction which is probably why Norm says what he does. paul
