discuss: Docbook, Xml, Jade etc.
Subject:
Re: Docbook, Xml, Jade etc.
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
29 Jul 2003 20:58:44 -0000
Message-Id: <20030729211141.GB517@lafn.org>
On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 04:15:25PM +0000, Chris Karakas wrote:
> In 20 years from now, when nobody will be using HTML
I don't think so. Someone might have predicted years ago that HTML
would replace plain text but it hasn't.
> when Adobe will be bankrupt (and with it the PDF and PS formats will
> be defunct), when "Word 2023" will tell you "Sorry, this RTF format is
> too old, I can't read it" - then I will ask you to print only those
> paragraphs of your document that contain a citation of the 10th
> bibliographic entry of your bibliography. With the "semantic Web"
> being a reality by then, this will be trivial to do with the SGML/XML
> version of your document. But, since "everyone reads HOWTO's in html
> anyway", you will have written it in HTML, a presentational markup of
> the last century, a markup unable to tell if a "10" refers to the font
> size or the 10th item of a list, and you will be unable to answer my
> (and "everyone's" by that time) simple query which I will have entered
> in a search engine.
Finding the places in a doc which cite a certain bibliographic entry is
easy, provided that the author has assigned that reference a unique id
(in LinuxDoc or DocBook). For example I might use the id="pins_". HTML
will use the same id but call it NAME="pins_". Then in the vi editor,
you put the cursor on pins_, type *, and it finds a bibliographic entry
that is labeled pins_. grep can do something similar. So what you
propose for 2023 is already here today. And it doen't require DocBook.
Even if one used the id="10" one could still search for it since other
10s will not have id (or NAME in HTML) in front of them. This requires
searching source which browsers can do.
> This may not be important to you, as it is currently not important to
> the authors of many millions HTML pages - but it is important to TLDP
> which, as an institution, is concerned about longevity of the
> documents it invests so much effort to publish.
>
Just the opposite (sort of) is true. Our old documents are mostly
obsolete and we are concerned about them not being updated.
> By the way, by far not "everyone" reads HOWTOs (or whatever for that
> matter) in HTML. I am one of the few that read *all* documents online,
> on the screen, and (consequently) I "read HOWTOS in HTML". Me and a
> few others (who I still have to meet) are not everyone: the vast
> majority of the people I know prefer to *print* the document and then
> really read it (as opposed to just skim it).
This is a big waste of paper. I think that most people mostly read
stuff on their PC screens, either offline or online.
Regarding the sematic web. I don't think that the tags contribute all
that much to sematic understanding.
David Lawyer
