Re: Re : db2??????? vs. SGMLTools2 vs. what else?

[David Mason <dcm@redhat.com>]

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From: "David C. Mason" <dcm@redhat.com>
Date: 23 Feb 2000 10:40:59 -0500
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Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> writes:

> / David Mason <dcm@redhat.com> was heard  to say:
> | Don't misunderstand me either - I say the more tools we have *the
> | better*! In fact, I'd like to see more tools for XML (that aren't
> | java) for the simple reason that once DocBook hits 5.0 it will
> only be
> | XML.
> 
> While true, I think that's a somewhat misleading statement.
> DocBook 5.0 will be an XML DTD, but XML *is* SGML, so
> it will be an SGML DTD as well. :-)

While true, ;) XML is becoming more and more its own beast in more
ways than one. The simple fact that our current tools don't handle it
well makes it *in reality* something different for the poor souls who
had to move from starting things off with <!DOCTYPE Book PUBLIC
"-//OASIS//DTD DocBook V4.0//EN"[]> to <?xml version="1.0"
standalone="no"?>.

And on the *nix platforms we don't have it as easy as those of you on
MS related products as we have no good tools to process XML
(IMHO). Sure jade handles it to some extent, even against dsssl, but
it doesn't handle XSL... There are a few java based tools available
but the java engines for *nix stink thanks to Sun... Someone has
threatened to put XSL support in Mozilla but backed down at the last
second..

So tell me in my *real world* setting how similar XML is to SGML
despite its continual claim that it is merely a 'subset' of SGML. If
it was just that why does XSL have to come along? why do new tools
have to be written? etc.

But despite all that, the thrust of my argument was that I don't want
yet another project called DocBook Tools! (which is not a DTD)


Dave