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From: Peter Eisentraut <[email protected]>
To: Joshua D. Drake <[email protected]>
Cc: David Fetter <[email protected]>
Cc: Guillaume Lelarge <[email protected]>
Cc: Josh Berkus <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Cc: David Blewett <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Switching to XML
Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2006 17:37:09 +0100
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>

Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> 1. Tools. SGML tools are not as actively developed as the XML ones.
> No you can not use XML tools with SGML as effectively.
>
> If I am wrong on #1 Peter, fine. Prove it.  You keep telling us we
> are wrong but are unwilling to share where or how.

Well, such statements are quite impossible to reason about because 
a "tool" can be just about anything.  There is no doubt that SGML tools 
are not as actively developed as the XML ones.  That could, for 
example, be because SGML is much older and stabilized and the tools 
have matured.

But none of this interests me unless someone can come up with a specific 
completion of the following sentence: "We need to do $ACTION because 
that allows us to use tool $TOOL, which is more efficient at doing 
$TASK than the currently used tool."

The only completion I have heard about so far is ACTION='switch source 
to XML', TOOL='OpenOffice', and TASK='editing'.  Others have pointed 
out that while OpenOffice can indeed edit DocBook XML, it wouldn't be 
very useful for that purpose in our case.  But I'm interested in 
hearing more about that.

> 2. We have two regional projects that take a lot of hard earned time
> to work around the lackluster state of our source documentation,
> namely SGML.

I know of one regional project that has done documentation work, the 
French one.  (I'm sorry that I missed the other one.)  Their reason for 
moving to XML was (a) to use FOP for (b) producing print output more 
efficiently.  But you can use FOP right now, so (a) is not a good 
reason, and we have fixed the print output generation now, so (b) isn't 
a reason either.

> This hard earned time would better be spent on other 
> things and could be if you would stop stonewalling and let us move to
> XML.

I'm not stonewalling anything.  If someone wants to prepare a case for 
moving to XML, be my guest.  I'm just here to debunk the reasons for 
moving to XML which are wrong.

-- 
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/

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