Re: A thought:

[Ali Abdin <aliabdin aucegypt edu>]

* Rebecca J. Walter (rjp mail tele dk) wrote at 15:36 on 28/11/00:
> png is also in sgml 4.0 so you don't necessarily have to switch to xml
> unless you want to.

The issue is "some tools don't work well with DocBook 4.0" - if they do, then we
can just switch to DocBook XML, instead of DocBook SGML (XML is better than
SGML (i.e. we have good XML parsers, but no SGML parses out there).

XML is very similiar to SGML so you might as well take advantage of it. (note:
I've been reading into XSLT (XML Stylesheet Transformations). With XSLT you
could (theoretically) convert a DocBook XML document -> HTML (or XHTML) by
just provided the XSL (XML Stylesheet). While researching it, I discovered a
"slide show" presentation by Normal Walsh showing off XSLT using DocBook as an
example ;)

Not sure if libxml supports this though :(

The great thing with this is that browsers may support it in the future, so
all you do is provide the XML doc (what you guys write) and the XSL stylesheet
(DocBook XML -> HTML/XHTML) and voila, your browser converts
it...MS IE has a broken implementation unfortunately, and I don't know if
mozilla supports this (but there is hope for the future!)

Also, you can have tools (like gnome-db2html2) that take the XSL and XML doc
and convert it (using some "XSL capable" library (libxml?))

Of course, if you have SGML docs XSL will not be possible (you can use SGML
docs but only if they are "well formed" (XML is a "well formed" SGML doc
(basically))

Regards,
Ali