From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Norman Walsh To: docbook-tools-discuss@sourceware.cygnus.com Subject: Re: I'm trying to set up docbook-tools... Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2000 06:36:00 -0000 Message-id: <87vgyinj8n.fsf@nwalsh.com> References: <200007041511.LAA15779@snark.thyrsus.com> <00070410352500.07357@ehome.inhouse> <00070510365404.00678@needaguru> <00070422425701.09328@ehome.inhouse> X-SW-Source: 2000/msg00250.html / Eric Lee Green 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 | All professional men are handicapped by http://nwalsh.com/ | not being allowed to ignore things | which are useless.--Goethe