To: Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>
cc: Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>, pgsql-docs@postgresql.org,
	David Blewett <david@dawninglight.net>
Subject: Re: Switching to XML 
In-reply-to: <4579B0B3.10507@agliodbs.com> 
References: <4579720E.4000707@dawninglight.net>
	<200612081902.11483.peter_e@gmx.net> <4579B0B3.10507@agliodbs.com>
Comments: In-reply-to Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>
	message dated "Fri, 08 Dec 2006 13:36:35 -0500"
Date: Sat, 09 Dec 2006 13:18:46 -0500
Message-ID: <19134.1165688326@sss.pgh.pa.us>
From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> writes:
> As I said then, this is absolutely untrue.  OpenOffice.org, for example, 
> works with DocBook XML but not SGML.  There are also a plethora of XML 
> editing and publishing tools which can been used for Docbook XML which 
> are not available for SGML.  A simple look at this page: 
> http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/DocBookAuthoringTools
> .... shows that there are more than twice as many authoring tools which 
> support only XML as support SGML -- and that most of the tools which 
> support SGML are out-of-maintenance.

This is confusing authoring tools (ie, stuff for more or less WYSIWYG
editing of the document source) with output generation tools.

As for authoring tools, show me one that produces SGML or XML that's
reasonably readable, and I might worry about allowing people to use it.
Most of the ones I've seen would render the doc sources unreadable for
anyone not using an authoring tool (possibly even the very same
authoring tool).  We are not going to move in that direction
because it would piss off the people who do the bulk of the work now.

			regards, tom lane