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Subject: Re: Ruminations on the future of DocBook
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 / Tobias Reif <tobiasreif@pinkjuice.com> was heard to say: | * will depend less on any specific schema language such as DTD (no | schema supplied attribute values etc). I'm certainly in favor of removing dependencies such as defaulted attribute values. But I do think we need to have a normative, formal schema to define what "valid" means for DocBook documents. | * will not contain any presentational features. That's a laudable goal, but my experience suggests that the distinction between semantic and presentational is not black and white. | * will be as media-independent as possible. That seems like a good goal. | * will continue to be useful for a wide range of scenarios, from tiny | howtos to large book projects. (the latter could mean that the number | or inline elements could not be decreased significantly) Yes, it needs to address at least the problem domain that DocBook currently addresses. | To address some of your points from | http://norman.walsh.name/2003/05/21/docbook : | | "If we were starting over, I think we'd approach the problem much | differently:" | | "We'd use XML." | | agreed :) | | "We'd use RELAX-NG." | | This seems to be a very fine schema language, but there are others. I | hope that DocBook won't again depend on one specific schema language. That depends what you mean by "depends", I guess. I don't think it's practical to say that the only normative definition of DocBook will be natural language prose. | "We'd design for the web." | | I suggest to forget the web when designing DocBook, as much as possible. | If DocBook stops being media-independent, I will stop using it. If I | author for one single specific medium, eg the web, I use a | media-specific language, eg XHTML. If I need media-independence, I can | use DocBook. I didn't mean the web to the exclusion of other media. | "We'd almost certinaly put it in a namespace." | | That's good. XSLT, SVG, all are in their namespace, and it's no problem. It's a problem if you still want to use DTDs and it's a nearly insoluble problem if you want to mix namespaces and use DTDs simultaneously. | One specific point: XLink might be a candidate for the linking | mechanism; SVG uses it for example. It might be. There's still (alas) plenty of controversy about XLink. Be seeing you, norm - -- Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | He who seeks happiness for himself http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | by making others unhappy is bound Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | in the chains of hate and from | those he cannot be free.--The | Dhammapada -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Processed by Mailcrypt 3.5.7 <http://mailcrypt.sourceforge.net/> iD8DBQE/Fu3yOyltUcwYWjsRAqV7AKCxKgoZluinX1GcfsYf3GkytVNRqQCgi9ek YPU6h8P5QJ3E3LtKhVkrc0o= =ZMMe -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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