Re: Re : db2??????? vs. SGMLTools2 vs. what else?

[Norman Walsh <ndw at nwalsh dot com>]

/ David Mason <dcm@redhat.com> was heard to say:
| > While true, I think that's a somewhat misleading statement.
| > DocBook 5.0 will be an XML DTD, but XML *is* SGML, so
| > it will be an SGML DTD as well. :-)
| 
| While true, ;) XML is becoming more and more its own beast in more
| ways than one. The simple fact that our current tools don't handle it
| well makes it *in reality* something different for the poor souls who
| had to move from starting things off with <!DOCTYPE Book PUBLIC
| "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook V4.0//EN"[]> to <?xml version="1.0"
| standalone="no"?>.

There are some authoring changes (system identifiers, empty tag
syntax, etc.), but the only thing the tools have to do
differently is pass an appropriate SGML declaration to, e.g.,
Jade.

| And on the *nix platforms we don't have it as easy as those of you on
| MS related products as we have no good tools to process XML
| (IMHO). Sure jade handles it to some extent, even against dsssl, but
| it doesn't handle XSL... There are a few java based tools available
| but the java engines for *nix stink thanks to Sun... Someone has
| threatened to put XSL support in Mozilla but backed down at the last
| second..

Huh? Jade and the Java based XSL tools ought to be damn near the
same.  If you're referring to IE5 support for XSL, it's so badly
broken that it's just about useless. (Worse than useless, in fact.)

I'm doing everything I do with XML using Jade and XT. Well,
except for editing which I sometimes use, um, Arbortext products
for, no surprise, and they aren't available for Linux (more's
the pity) but they sure are available for Unix.

| So tell me in my *real world* setting how similar XML is to SGML
| despite its continual claim that it is merely a 'subset' of SGML. If
| it was just that why does XSL have to come along? why do new tools
| have to be written? etc.

I'll save some of my wilder theories for a chat over a beer some
night, but the simpler answer is that the new tools are coming
along because XML is easier to process than SGML. XML is mostly
marketing.

New tools *don't have to be written*. All your existing SGML
tools work just fine.

| But despite all that, the thrust of my argument was that I don't want
| yet another project called DocBook Tools! (which is not a DTD)

I'm staying out of that one. :-)

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Fast. Cheap. Well. Pick two.
http://nwalsh.com/                 |