Re: DocBook/XML summary - Mailing list pgsql-docs

> 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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