Re: I'm trying to set up docbook-tools...

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ Eric Lee Green <eric@badtux.org> was heard to say:
| Unfortunately, the SGML purists appear to believe that their job is
| done once they've created the raw DTD... "just read the DTD!"
| appears to be the notion.

Reading the DTD isn't going to help at all with the problem of setting
up a toolchain, so I'm confused. Are you saying that SGML/XML are not
well described? Or that a particular DTD (e.g, DocBook) is not well
described? Or that the mechanics of setting up a toolchain (on your
system, for the output you want) are not well described?

| Correct. I've already discussed the notion that SGML purists appear
| to believe that their job is done once they've created the raw DTD
| and (optionally) style sheet. 

An SGML purist *is done* when they've created the doctype (or Schema).
That's the job you hire them to do. (Note that a doctype includes
prose documentation, a .dtd file isn't enough and was never believed
to be enough.) That said, I don't consider myself a purist and I've
spent a lot of time writing stylesheets and documenting them as best I
could under the constraints of time and a day job.

No one (that I know) would be silly enough to argue that you *don't
need* a toolchain, but there is tremendous variablity in setting up
the toolchain. Thanks to the tremdous effort of folks involved in
efforts like docbook-tools, we're beginning to see open source
distributions of tools that can be reasonably documented and will
produce results for lots of folks on lots of platforms. This is a
welcome change for those of us who have been lamenting the fact that
SGML was almost completely a "build your own" environment for so many
years.

| This attitude is what has prevented
| SGML from supplanting TeX/LaTeX for structured document creation.

Prevented where? Oh, nevermind, it's an inflammatory remark.

| I have taken to running jadetex by hand until the 'unresolved
| reference' messages go away, then running dvi2ps by hand. Some of my
| page references STILL turn out to be -999.

I've forgotten where this started. These are TOC page references or
index page references?

| > that situation is not likely to improve what with SGML is dead
| proclamations > doing the rounds and shift is towards XML . but
| again tools for XML are not unix > favorable at all .

For the purposes of this discussion, XML is SGML. There's no
appreciable difference.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | All professional men are handicapped by
http://nwalsh.com/            | not being allowed to ignore things
                              | which are useless.--Goethe