Possible advantages of using XML:
- Future DocBook development will be XML-only (or at least XML-mainly),
so in the (very) long run we will have to switch anyway because the
tools aren't there anymore.
Well sgml tools is probably a long way from dying as you note with (very) ;)
- XML editing tools are more widely available. (Totally unconfirmed
assumption; I'm happy with what I have.)
Most XML tools I have ran into also support SGML.
- Translation tools may work better with XML sources. (Totally
unconfirmed; would need to be in actual use by someone.)
Do you mean language translation or transformation (as in pdf?).
- Could use MathML, SVG, and other extensions (but I don't think they
actually work yet).
SVG is really nice. I don't know much about MathML.
- When XML support is available in PostgreSQL, you can import the
documentation and do wild things. ;-)
Actually that could be fairly interesting from a \h point of view from psql.
Possible disadvantages of using XML:
- Marked sections don't work anymore; would need to use DocBook-specific
profiling mechanism, which isn't all that elegant.
I don't know what is meant by this.
- More typing: Things like <abc>foo</> and other abbreviations won't
work anymore; all attributes would need to be quoted, etc.
That is true, but we also get better interoperability, like going from
xml->doc
- doc/src/sgml/*.sgml will look silly for filenames.
Well that is an easy fix with a one line shell script and some sed
within the docs ;)
- Someone would need to do the conversion. I understand that the French
translation team might have patches available.
This is actually fairly easy to do. We did it with our book in half a
day. The postgresql docs are about 2 times the size of our book IIRC.
So that is it. In my mind, there is no clear winner, but if someone has
a concrete need for XML, I don't see a problem with it.
The one thing that I am still unaware of is a good print quality output
for Docbook XML. Now to be honest I haven't checked in some time but one
of our primary goals *needs* to be to efficiently convert to PDF.
Sincerely,
Joshua D. Drake
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