RE: A thought:

[Gregory Leblanc <GLeblanc cu-portland edu>]

Well since Dave hasn't chimed in, I thought I'd see if I could stir up some
trouble.  :-)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ali Abdin [mailto: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).

The new tools actually work reasonably well with DocBook 3 and DocBook 4,
both SGML and XML, using the DSSSL stylesheets, right now.  Unfortunately,
there are a few bugs left in the new tools, and the packaging of the new
tools is quite broken.  I'm hoping to badger Eric into getting both of these
resolved within a week or two, so that we can actually sanction the new
tools, and perhaps allow people to use DocBook XML.  SGML using DocBook 3.1
and the GNOME PNG Variant 1.1 are what we'll be using for 1.4.

> 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 ;)

The GDP Handbook standards and procedures make all of our docs very "forward
compatible", with the exception of images (this will get changed post 1.4).
By forward compatible, I mean that they're almost XML docs already, and that
the transition to DocBook 4 will be relatively painless.

> 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!)

Unfortunately, I don't think Mozilla will have this when it's released.  :-(
Perhaps it will return in a later version, but it's hard to predict.

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

I don't think libxml is capable of XSLT transformations.  Perhaps an XSLT
engine could use libxml for some of it's functions, but I don't think that's
being done.  Once we have a good XSLT engine available, we should be able to
use just DocBook XML and some XSL stylesheets, and get rid of hacks like
gnome-db2html2.
	Greg