Documentation DTD

Rod Taylor <rbt@zort.ca> writes:

Anyone mind if we bump the DTD version to Docbook 4.2?

Peter E. is the gatekeeper on that, I think --- he pushed us to 4.1
not long ago.

If Peter's okay with 4.2, then full speed ahead ...

regards, tom lane

PS: pgsql-docs is probably the more appropriate forum for this
discussion.

Rod Taylor writes:

Anyone mind if we bump the DTD version to Docbook 4.2?

Not sure if we should do this now. We're approaching the time where
people should be writing documentation, not having to refiddle their
carefully crafted DocBook installations. We're not going to realize any
immediate benefits anyway.

What it buys is a number of useful tags, SVGs and probably more
importantly for the future, xsl and fop support which will probably be
important in the future. OpenJade hasn't had a new release in quite a
long time -- not to say work isn't needed.

The last release was in January.

Yes, after updating docs to the newer DTD I intend to make them XML
compliant to ensure they work with v5 of docbook in the future.

Ah, an XML vs. SGML debate. I look forward to it.

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e@gmx.net

Yes, after updating docs to the newer DTD I intend to make them XML
compliant to ensure they work with v5 of docbook in the future.

Ah, an XML vs. SGML debate. I look forward to it.

This one is pretty simple. It's been announced that the docbook group
isn't looking to continue with SGML. This is shown on the oasis-open
pages as well as their discussion in the mailing lists (xsltproc and fop
rather than jade and dsssl).

I prefer working with SGML, but not enough to try hacking away at
openjade to finish it off :)

Anyway, you're right about the patch. Lets apply it to the 7.4 tree
after branching.

Rod Taylor writes:

Anyone mind if we bump the DTD version to Docbook 4.2?

Not sure if we should do this now. We're approaching the time where
people should be writing documentation, not having to refiddle their
carefully crafted DocBook installations. We're not going to realize any
immediate benefits anyway.

Indeed.

What it buys is a number of useful tags, SVGs and probably more
importantly for the future, xsl and fop support which will probably be
important in the future. OpenJade hasn't had a new release in quite a
long time -- not to say work isn't needed.

The last release was in January.

Yes, after updating docs to the newer DTD I intend to make them XML
compliant to ensure they work with v5 of docbook in the future.

Ah, an XML vs. SGML debate. I look forward to it.

Please no!

If and when it becomes forcibly preferable to use XML, there's a
tool called sgml2xml that is part of the "sp" package (which includes nsgmls
and sgmlnorm) that does a Perfectly Good Job of this. Totally automated.

Possible exception: sgml2xml capitalizes all the tags, and it looks like the
XML DTD wants MixedCaseTagging, which is a rather irritating thing about XML;
in any case, that's something that should be fixed up in one fell swoop in a
"normalize it all and make it into XML" process LATER.

It would make sense to fix use of any deprecated elements, but "fixing" any
XML aspects of it now is pretty much a senseless exercise.
--
(reverse (concatenate 'string "moc.enworbbc@" "enworbbc"))
http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/emacs.html
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons". -- POPULAR
MECHANICS magazine forecasting the "relentless march of science" 1955

Rod Taylor writes:

This one is pretty simple. It's been announced that the docbook group
isn't looking to continue with SGML.

I don't know where you got this from, but it's not true. DocBook 5 will
support SGML. And as long as they publish DTDs you can use them with SGML
tools anyway.

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e@gmx.net

On Sat, 2002-08-17 at 11:47, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

Rod Taylor writes:

This one is pretty simple. It's been announced that the docbook group
isn't looking to continue with SGML.

I don't know where you got this from, but it's not true. DocBook 5 will
support SGML. And as long as they publish DTDs you can use them with SGML
tools anyway.

Yes, jade and friends will work. But Fop is quickly catching up to the
dsssl abilities and can already do some things much cleaner (title
pages, headers and footers).

Anyway, XML or SGML doesn't really matter. There are a number of
enhancements I'd like to make to the doc process which won't be affected
either way. Auto-generated example output, and others to help things
stay in sync.

Rod Taylor writes:

Yes, jade and friends will work. But Fop is quickly catching up to the
dsssl abilities and can already do some things much cleaner (title
pages, headers and footers).

The real concern is that the XSLT stylesheets aren't anywhere near the
maturity of the DSSSL releases. I occasionally build the PostgreSQL
documentation with various combinations of XSL tools and the results are
basically too ugly to look at -- if you get anything to look at in the
first place.

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e@gmx.net