From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Norman Walsh To: David Mason Cc: docbook-tools-discuss@sourceware.cygnus.com Subject: Re: Re : db2??????? vs. SGMLTools2 vs. what else? Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2000 06:36:00 -0000 Message-id: <7453-Wed23Feb2000110215-0500-ndw@nwalsh.com> References: <951281049.19725.ezmlm@sourceware.cygnus.com> <200002231540.KAA08528@devserv.devel.redhat.com> X-SW-Source: 2000/msg00077.html / David Mason was heard to say: | > 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 to . There are some authoring changes (system identifiers, empty tag syntax, etc.), but the only thing the tools have to do differently is pass an appropriate SGML declaration to, e.g., Jade. | 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.. Huh? Jade and the Java based XSL tools ought to be damn near the same. If you're referring to IE5 support for XSL, it's so badly broken that it's just about useless. (Worse than useless, in fact.) I'm doing everything I do with XML using Jade and XT. Well, except for editing which I sometimes use, um, Arbortext products for, no surprise, and they aren't available for Linux (more's the pity) but they sure are available for Unix. | 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. I'll save some of my wilder theories for a chat over a beer some night, but the simpler answer is that the new tools are coming along because XML is easier to process than SGML. XML is mostly marketing. New tools *don't have to be written*. All your existing SGML tools work just fine. | 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) I'm staying out of that one. :-) Be seeing you, norm -- Norman Walsh | Fast. Cheap. Well. Pick two. http://nwalsh.com/ |