Re: if SGML is so great...

[Stein Gjoen <sgjoen@mail.nyx.net>]

Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> > From: Stein Gjoen [mailto:sgjoen@mail.nyx.net]
[snip]

> > My large reply crashed here so I'll rewrite it later. In summary
> > I feel we need more tags for our specific needs. SGML is
> > scalable and extensible, right?
> 
> Yes, what sorts of tags are you looking for?  I haven't found anything that
> I want that isn't in DocBook yet (well, except PNG support), but I've only
> got 1 doc that I'm working on that's big.
>         Greg

My long time goal of document accessibility and integration
have made me think we need tags for

man pages: <manpage section="1">du</manpage>
that renders to du(1) in plain text and adds hyperlinks to HTML
pages and adds to the RELATED list in stub man pages. Some
commands have multiple man pages, such as mount(2) and mount(8)
so a section number is needed.

HOWTO: <howto>Multi Disk HOWTO</howto>
that renders to links to that HOWTO in the HTML pages
and adds to the RELATED list in stub man pages.

In addition I wish the <file> tag rendering was changed to
file:///pathoffile URL in the HTML document, shown in courier
or similar font. This too would be handy in stub man pages.

Generally I prefer filenames and commands to be rendered in
courier or a similar non proportional font.

Rendering of the hyperlinks would be installation dependent,
so on the LinuxDoc web pages it would refer to sample files
wheras on a home system it would point to the actual file.

Likewise hyperlinks to HOWTOs and man pages would be rendered
as appropriate for the installation, be it with cgi-scripts,
calls to xman or the like.


Today the SGML functionality is used just for conversion, we
have hardly started tapping the true power of SGML and as such
it is not surprising some are sceptical to this platform.
Even LaTeX offers in some areas superior conversion features
if that is all we are after.

>From what I can see we don't even use SGML for searching, is
this correct?

To start tapping the power of SGML we need to recruit people
to make these scripts and changes so we authors don't have to
spend our time on it.

My NetHelp sample was rendered by hand and it was very tedious.
If what people say about the superiority of SGML, this should
be simple for the experts to whip up quickly.

When I write the next update for submission to LWN I'll add a
bit about this unless I get a lot of protests. As usual previews
will come here first.


Regards,
   Stein Gjoen


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