On Fri, 23 Oct 1998, Jose Abilio Oliveira Matos wrote:
> I have tought about that lately and how not to reinvent the wheel over and
> over again.
> My proposal sgml related, as you would expect ;)
>
> This is not only relevant to the file format but also to the layout scheme
> used. (Now after writing this I don't see how this is related with the
> fileformat but you could tell me :)
>
> I suggest that we have 2 files related with each document type, one
> textclass, as we have now, and something like a dtd.
>
> The dtd would descrive the structure, and the textclass the presentation.
> Inside the dtd you would know which are, and are not, allowed inside the
> title, inside tables, and so on.
> The textclass tell us how to display that layout.
>
> We would need a dtd parser, but shouldn't be too dificult since the dtd
> sysntax is very well defined.
>
> Would this help with the file format, or are different issues?
> Any comment?
Some time ago I thought about this need. I'd like something simpler than
the dtd scheme but I'm not sure what.
Admittedly, if we find a suitable dtd parser for free then we could
probably have a great number of sgml formats we could support since these
are all based on dtd's.
I have previously suggested a scheme where we exploit LyX's existing
knowledge of sections (call them s1 s2 s3 etc) and LyX's knowledge of
lists. That proposal was getting quite complicated and in the end JMarc
suggested a guile/scheme based layout. Then we start looking at really
tricky stuff like that suggested by Cees de Groot in his proposal for an
SGML editor (found on the sgmltools web site) which uses Python and some
pretty far out ideas.
We do need something and a dtd based scheme would be very powerful but
maybe too general at the same time.
Regards,
Allan (ARRae)
P.S. RedHat are offering a job for a documenter with SGML or LaTeX
experience if anyone is interested.
