Re: The gnome-help.2

[Andy Smith <ams70 cam ac uk>]

Karl Eichwalder <keichwa@gmx.net> writes:

> Andy Smith <ams70@cam.ac.uk> writes:
> 
> > The main difficulty being that LaTeX isn't very good at semantic
> > markup.
> 
> You're mixing TeX with LaTeX.  LaTeX is semantic markup.  LaTeX is not
> an ISO standard -- SGML is.  XML isn't an ISO standard neither -- go
> figure ;-)

LaTeX is certainly a big improvement over TeX wrt semantic markup
(fair enough since TeX wasn't designed for that), but it's still
fairly half-assed about it compared to good SGML/XML DTDs or even to
Texinfo.  The semantic tags in LaTeX are more designed to allow style
sheets to control printed output consistently and to allow automatic
ToC generation etc. than to really separate the document from its
means of presentation.  LaTeX tables, for instance, are very oriented
towards printing and it's much harder to get a useful stream of speech
from them than from HTML 4 tables (not sure how the tables in DocBook
compare).

With LaTeX you also lose the powerful search/query abilities you can
get from DocBook (not that they're very heavily used at the moment).
For instance, in a GNOME program you could right-click on something on
the screen, select "what's this?" or something less Windows-y, and
have the help browser search the DocBook help for a matching
<guiitem>.  (This would need a bit of refinement to be really useful,
but it could cut down on the work of maintaining links between app and
help quite a bit).  You could get the same effect from LaTeX by
defining new commands, but then it would be non-standard and you'd
have to get your tools to recognise them.  LaTeX docs tend to rely on
a big mess of add-on packages and writer- or document-specific hacks,
and aren't as interchangeable and interoperable as SGML/XML with good,
standardised DTDs.

Andy