From: Joshua D. Drake <jd@commandprompt.com>
To: Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>
Cc: pgsql-docs@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: DocBook/XML summary
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2006 16:59:14 -0700
Message-ID: <44B98152.70001@commandprompt.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <200607160115.51824.peter_e@gmx.net>
References: <200607160115.51824.peter_e@gmx.net>
> 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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To: pgsql-docs@postgresql.org
Cc: jd@commandprompt.com, peter_e@gmx.net
Subject: Re: DocBook/XML summary
In-Reply-To: <44B98152.70001@commandprompt.com>
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