discuss: Summary of GNU/Linux Tools HOWTO -- could you add this as a work-in-progress
Subject:
Re: Summary of GNU/Linux Tools HOWTO -- could you add this as a work-in-progress
From:
Morgon Kanter ####@####.####
Date:
7 Feb 2003 13:26:04 -0000
Message-Id: <E18h7XI-0001ah-00@Daedalus>
> Does the LDP have a particular preference on SGML or XML (DocBook)....
> Chris have you or are you ready to release the scripts?
I think Eric Raymond summed this up best in the DocBook Demystification
Howto, part 11.2, "Why SGML DocBook is dead"
----------quote----------
The DSSSL toolchain is, as far as new development goes, effectively dead. The
XSLT toolchain has just reached production status as I write in August 2002;
a working version shipped in Red Hat 7.3. It's where DocBook developers are
putting almost all of their effort.
The reason for the change to XML was threefold. First, SGML turned out to be
too complicated to use; then, DSSSL turned out to be too complicated to live
with; then, significant parts of the DSSSL toolchain turned out to be weak
and irredeemably messy.
Relative to SGML, XML has a reduced feature set that is sufficient for almost
all purposes but much easier to understand and build parsers for.
SGML-processing tools (such as validating parsers) have to carry around
support for a lot of features that DocBook and other text markup systems
never actually used. Removing these features made XML simpler and
XML-processing tools faster.
The language used to describe SGML DTDs is sufficiently spiky and forbidding
that composing SGML DTDs was something of a black art. XML DTDs, on the other
hand, can be described in a dialect of XML itself; there does not need to be
a separate DTD language. An XML description of an XML DTD is called a schema;
the term DTD itself will probably pass out of use as the standards for
schemas firm up.
But mostly the DSSSL toolchain is dead because DSSSL itself, the SGML
stylesheet description language in that toolchain, proved just too arcane for
most human beings, and made stylesheets too difficult to write and modify.
(It was a dialect of Scheme. Your humble editor, a LISP-head from way back,
shakes his head in sad bemusement that this should drive people away.)
XML fans like to sum up all these changes with "XML: tastes great, less
filling."
----------end quote----------
And there's more stylesheets for the XML dtd, like the manpage one :)
Morgon
--
Visit my site, http://www.surgo.net, for information on my various projects.
Grab my public key from http://www.surgo.net/pubkey.asc
