Re: Doc Tasks (was RE: docstrings in Guile!)

[Valentin Kamyshenko <val at kamysh dot materials dot kiev dot ua>]

>>>>> "Greg" == Greg J Badros <gjb@cs.washington.edu> writes:


>> As for me, I consider the whole ideology of .sgml as a step in a
>> wrong direction (of course, this is my subjective opinion). If I
>> want to have a good-looking document, I'd use the whole power of
>> TeX, and would not limit myself to undefined subset of tags, that
>> are present in SGML. If I want to have .html, I'll just write .html
>> (although, as for me, it is much less convenient for reading
>> documentation, that .info). If I want to have good-commented
>> source, I use CWEB, or fweb. And so on.

Greg> But the point of Docbook markup is to permit getting any of
Greg> those formats from a single source by enriching that source
Greg> substantial.

This is   exactly the point  that  I  could  never understand.   Let's
consider   LaTeX,  the whole  set  of styles  of  which  will never be
reproduced by anything  else (one of  the obvious reason is  - because
its evolution is still very fast :).  You can either do adding tags to
sgml, trying  to make possible to explore  the  full power of  TeX, or
effectively limit  yourself  to a  subset  of TeX commands,  that have
equivalents in other possible formats. First possibility leads to just
rewriting of (La)TeX commands   in less convenient terms;  the  second
means, that  you think in terms  of some  other format  - would  it be
.html,  or .rtf, or  whatever.  HTML  is the  most  poor in  a  set of
languages, that are  used as the outputs  of  sgml2*. So, effectively,
using SGML means that you use HTML, probably,  modified and extended a
bit - if you  would  add tags in SGML   that do not have analogues  in
HTML, you will not be able to obtain a readable .html from .sgml, and,
so, what was the goal of  the game?  From  the other side, if you have
.html you can  transform  it  to  nearly  anything  you like,  because
MSWord, WordPerfect   and other commercial word  processors understand
this format and  can transform it  to many  others.  As for me,  .html
documents are not  convenient for reading technical documentation; so,
I would prefer to make "step back"  from the HTML, and  to limit a set
of possible tags even more - to the level of TeXinfo :). As for me, to
have  a    "good  looking" documentation  in    TeXinfo  format may be
considered as the primary goal of the document preparation.

--
Best regards,
	Valentin.