DocBook is good for "real" books where you want to/have to produce a PDF, thanks to the DocBook-XSL stylesheet package. How do you produce PDF from HTML5 source?
DocBook is good if you can live within its schema. I store all kinds of metadata in its attributes and haven't felt limited yet. There is a fairly strong movement against modifying the schema, though I guess that's better than HTML5 where you have no choice at all for elements and very little choice (except at your own risk) for attributes. The DocBook community is obviously much smaller than the HTML[5] community, and composed primarily of writers rather than developers. I get the feeling that most writers work in companies and are provided with a toolchain which significantly insulates them from DocBook. I edit in emacs, which isn't so unusual in web-world but is definitely unusual in DocBook-land. Overall I think DocBook is a worthy industrial alternative to LaTeX, but I think that most people will find DocBook too heavyweight and will instead be satisfied with [X]HTML5. On Feb 3, 2:07 am, "Fabrizio Giudici" <[email protected]> wrote: > I've (laaaazily) started collecting my blog posts, reorganized, into a > book that I'd use for my mentoring activities. The choice so far has been > DocBook + Maven + a specific Maven plugin that allows me to include live > portions of code samples. So far so good. But so far I've worked > copypasting my existing blog posts, translated from HTML to DocBook XML, > while I realize that it would be much more efficient, for new blog posts, > to write them in DocBook XML and convert to HTML. At this point, the > question: with HTML5 which supports microformats, is DocBook still worth > while? Cay Hortsmann, in an interview, said he's using XHTML for writing > his book about Scala: > > http://blog.eisele.net/2011/10/heroes-of-java-cay-horstmann.html > > Actually, what I find annoying for DocBook is editing. I'm using XmlEditor > from XmlMind (http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/) which explicitly supports > DocBook XML, but it's not the most agile editing I've experienced so far. > Until a few weeks ago I was not satisfied with HTML editors as well, so it > made little difference. But now I've found Bluegriffon and I work wery > well with it. That's why I'm evaluating whether moving definitely to HTML5 > is a good idea. More in detail, as I'm moving all my sites to a compact > CMS I've written, the idea for publishing DocBook stuff was to integrate > into my CMS the XSLT transformation from DocBook XML to HTML. The HTML5 > approach could make this integration unneeded. > > And, BTW, I'm a bit confused about the relationship between HTML5 and > XHTML5, and whether the latter will be really adopted or not. > > Thanks for any suggestion. > > -- > Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager > Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere." > [email protected]http://tidalwave.it-http://fabriziogiudici.it -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
