Re: [docbook] DiML/DocBook (was: using modules; version attribute)

[Bob Stayton <bobs at sco dot com>]

Hi Jakob,
Thanks for posting this information.
I was curious about why you chose to not use DocBook.
I can understand why you thought there was a lot in
it that you wouldn't need.  One of the areas
the DocBook Technical Committee is investigating
is modularity.  

Your own DTD is very interesting.  I was interested in
the integration of MathML.   Was the imath element
for inline math and the dmath element for math
displayed in a block?

To help me explore your DTD, I made a LiveDTD version of it
so I could see how the MathML stuff fit in.  You can browse
that version if you like at
http://www.sagehill.net/livedtd/xdiml/
If you haven't used it yet, LiveDTD is a very
useful tool for anyone who has to maintain a complex
DTD like yours.

Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
Publications Architect                      Santa Cruz, CA  95060
Technical Publications                      voice: (831) 427-7796
The SCO Group                               fax:   (831) 429-1887
                                            email: bobs@sco.com

On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 11:55:18PM +0200, Jakob Voss wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Tobias Reif pointed me to this discussion and asked me to explain why we 
> "switched away from DocBook". I am a student working at the electronic 
> publishing group of Computer and Media Service (CMS) at Humboldt 
> University, Berlin. We are archiving electronic dissertations for 
> several years - see our document server:  http://edoc.hu-berlin.de
> 
> Most universities are only archiving in PDF - which has disatvantages in 
> long-term preservation and almost no semantic markup. But how do you get 
> markup? We force ;-) the authors to use a Microsoft Word Template (also 
> supporting WordPerfect and LaTeX) and used "SGML Author for Word" to 
> transform the document to SGML. The Word-issue is a must because most of 
> the authors are using it - you just have to support it.
> 
> We have used a modified version of the Electronic Thesis and 
> Dissertations DTD "ETD.dtd" called "DiML" (in SGML) since 1997.
> It was my job to create an XML version of DiML - so we never used 
> DocBook. When I started last year I also asked myself why not to use 
> DocBook or TEI but the main reason is simply the purpose: There are 
> several XML-based document formats (XHTML, TEI, DocBook, ISO Book, Open 
> Office, NITF...) for different purposes. DocBook is full of elements you 
> may need for documentations in computer science but it's not the right 
> language to write dissertations in for instance social sciences.
> 
> I rebuilt the DiML-DTD in a higly modularized way. Since I found no 
> satisfying XML based language to manage *and* document DTDs (DDML was 
> just a try) a wrote a system on my own. The elements of the DiML-DTD are 
> stored in modules written in XML. I used parts of DocBook to write the 
> documentation in the same file with the definition:
> 
> <module name="lists" version="1.0">
>    <refpurpose lang="en">...</refpurpose>
>    <refpurpose lang="de">...</refpurpose>
>    <refdescription lang="en">
>      <para>...<!--DocBook-->...</para>...
>    </refdescription>
>    <element name="ul">
>      <group>block</group>
>      <refpurpose lang="de">...</refpurpose>
>      ...
>      <contentspec type="children"> <!-- (caption?, li+) -->
>        <dtd-sequence>
>          <dtd-element name="caption" occurence="optional"/>
>          <dtd-element name="li" occurence="more"/>
>        </dtd-sequence>
>      </contentspec>
>    </element>
>    ...
> 
> You can "compile" a DTD out of several modules with an XSLT script and I 
> used the DocBook XSLT Library and DocBook Website to create HTML. Since 
> we have parts of a "DiML XSLT library" (diml-xsl) now, I'm switching to 
> DiML for documenting the DTD itself. Using DocBook was not comfortable 
> because there is this big DTD *and* the huge DocBook XSLT (I think this 
> is the reason why Tobi is working of another XSLT to transform DocBook 
> into XHTML).
> 
> diml-xsl (diml2html) is modularized in the same way as the DiML DTD. In 
> the main file I import all the subdirectories via
> 
> <xsl:include href="module-common/html.xsl"/>
> <xsl:include href="module-media/html.xsl"/>
> <xsl:include href="module-text/html.xsl"/>
> <xsl:include href="module-structure/html.xsl"/>
> <xsl:include href="module-citation/html.xsl"/>
> <xsl:include href="module-documents/html.xsl"/>
> <xsl:include href="module-mathematics/html.xsl"/>
> <xsl:include href="module-CALStable/html.xsl"/>
> <xsl:include href="module-lists/html.xsl"/>
> <xsl:include href="module-diml/html.xsl"/>
> 
> and if a module is not used in a DiML-file, then you also do not need 
> the according part of diml-xsl. By the way the styles for our module 
> "CALSTable" mainly consist of parts of DocBook XSLT which i will have
> to clean up a lot. The single modules contain only 2 to 22 elements.
> 
> You can download DiML-DTD at  http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/diml/
> 
> And diml-xsl is accessible via
> 
> http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=66498&release_id=166350
> 
> But it's only documented in German. To use diml-xsl transforming a 
> dissertation or some other document into single HTML-files:
> 
> -install diml-xsl to directory  $FOO/diml-xsl/
> -install DiML-DTD to directory  $FOO/dtd/xdiml.dtd
> -cd $FOO/diml-xsl/tools/
> -DiMLTransform.bat ../samples/test.xml ../samples/ ../style/
>   or with Xalan and '.' in your CLASSPATH
> -java DiMLTransform ../samples/test.xml ../samples/ ../style/
> 
> Feedback is welcome :-)
> 
> Personally I do not use DocBook because I prefer writing text in 
> WYSIWYG-editors. I think OpenOffice is on the right way (we use Open 
> Office to transform Word to XML and another XSLT to get DiML)
> 
>   Jakob Voß
> 
> 
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-- 

Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
Publications Architect                      Santa Cruz, CA  95060
Technical Publications                      voice: (831) 427-7796
The SCO Group                               fax:   (831) 429-1887
                                            email: bobs@sco.com

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