RE: Small DTD problem

[<jfleck inkstain net>]

On Tue, 10 Oct 2000, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> > From: Alexander Kirillov [mailto:kirillov math sunysb edu]
> > 
> > It was discussed here - and decided against. Dave Mason, one of our
> > DocBook gurus, was of the opinion that 4.1 is not ready for prime time
> > yet. Also, the DocBook 4.1 packages are not yet widespread, so
> > using  4.1 would create headaches for package builders. Thus, we
> > decided to postpone adoption of 4.1 until after gnome 1.4
> 
> That was NOT the understanding that I had.  I thought that Dave had argued
> against using XML/XSL (or at very least against the XSL stuff) for the time
> being.  The problem was that there were not' any good XSL engines, so we
> needed/wanted to stay away from that.  DocBook SGML 4.1 can be processed in
> exactly the same was as DocBook 3, one simply needs updated DTDs installed.
> Two questions from this.  Ali, what DTD have you been using to develop
> against?

gnome-db2html has been tested against all three - GNOME 3.1, DocBook SGML
4.1 and DocBook XML 4.1, and handles all three OK. Obviously, since we're
now using GNOME 3.1, that's where the bulk of the testing has been done,
so if we switch a lot of new testing will be needed to make sure we're OK.
But in general, Nautilus/gnome-db2html2 is not the issue here.

David's point was that the style sheets for 4 are not mature enough yet:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-doc-list/2000-July/msg00052.html
So even if gnome-db2html2 is perfect and ready to ship (which it
isn't), we would have difficulty publishubg our docs in other forms. And
if we decide at the last minute that gnome-db2html2 is not ready, then we
need to be sure we can generate good html for the 1.4 release.

So absent a strong reason to switch, which I haven't yet seen, I see no
reason to make the change until after 1.4.

Cheers,

John Fleck