On Tue, Dec 04, 2007 at 10:23:35AM +0000, Gavin Maltby wrote: > Michelle Olson wrote: > > > Why can't you access tools? It is just XML, you can use any tools you > > want. > > I accept that we can edit XML with any old editor (I prefer > 'cat > file' myself, and simply repeat material I'm not > changing) but presumably a "real" typesetting package is > normally used and it simply saves in this XML format? > Is that format understood by anything like OpenOffice/StarOffice > or is it specific to a product that users would have to part > with cash for? > > Cheers > > Gavin
The root issue is that XML, particularly with Docbook DTD, doesn't describe formatting, it describes content. You don't say "make this italic", you say "this word is the introduction of a new term" by using the <firstterm> tag, as an example. Then a particular formatting back-end, like XML->HTML or XML->NROFF turns that into italic or changes the font or whatever you like. It is semantic markup not formatting markup. This achieves two things: it provides better information for i18n translators, and it presumably makes structured data on which you can do more interesting processing. That said, having written a lot of this myself, DTrace guide and MDB guide, my view is that it's hideous to edit, the printed copy isn't up to what I'd like to see, and I sincerely question the benefit of what we get from the purported structure, since I firmly believe a Google or equivalent search of unstructured data performs better and returns more useful results than anything we've built out of the fancy structured data. The bottom line for me at this point is that we need to enable simple community developer contributions to content. I think wikis in general are the best way to achieve that. And they offer the simple formatting tools you are asking about. An interesting question for the doc community to puruse is whether we can have documentation in wiki form and then have the source form underneath be Docbook XML or be extractable to Docbook XML for parts of that tool chain that are useful. -Mike -- Mike Shapiro, Solaris Kernel Development. blogs.sun.com/mws/
