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Subject: Re: [docbook] DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 18 Mar2003
On Wed, Mar 19, 2003 at 04:53:14PM +0100, Jirka Kosek wrote: > I personally think that allowing HTML tables together with CALS tables > will confuse users. Ordinary users are always confused when they are > supposed to make decision. Should we make this even harder for them? XML > vs SGML, DSSSL vs XSL, lists inside para vs list between para, HTML vs > CALS, ... I don't want to take part in this forking ride. I'd like to add another point of view. Currently the (X)HTML and CALS table models may be similar enough in terms of power/flexibility that it doesn't so much matter which one you chose, you'll be able to tag your stuff in a similar way. That is, it is highly possible that most people knowing (X)HTML will not even look at CALS. So good for now. Now consider that we may want to extend the table model used in DocBook, for example to get rows grouping like I demonstrated in xtable[1]. If we were to add such a feature and others to (X)HTML, sooner or later that would not be exactly (X)HTML any more, and the users would possibly get into false expectations. Obviously this assumes that it is at all reasonable to extend (X)HTML tables within the scope of DocBook, whereas it is an actively maintained standard under the aegis of W3C... Now the latter argument could also be applied the the CALS model. But IIRC (please correct me if I'm wrong) we already saw an OASIS table model, which is just the CALS model with a fix wrt "pernicious mixed content model". This advocates to me that, under the aegis of OASIS, we could continue to extend our own table model, which we possibly can't do so easily with an (X)HTML-derived table format without confusing users. Then you may ask why not both allowing (X)HTML and an evolving OASIS table model. But if most users elect to use (X)HTML over CALS/OASIS for initial markup, then when they realize that their tables would benefit from such extensions, they would have to do a great rewrite of those tables, which they wouldn't have needed (or at least would be far less painful), should they have written it in CALS/OASIS at first. [1] http://savannah.nongnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/alcovebook/xtable/ Regards, -- Yann Dirson <Yann.Dirson@fr.alcove.com> http://www.alcove.com/ Technical support manager Responsable de l'assistance technique Senior Free-Software Consultant Consultant senior en Logiciels Libres Debian developer (dirson@debian.org) Développeur Debian
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