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