(sgml vs XML)+indexing

[Laszlo Kovacs <laszlo kovacs sun com>]

Hello,

I talked to Jacek Ambroziak today who works for Sun on the StarOffice
(OpenOffice) Help System. They work on an index based search engine on
XML files (implemented with JAVA XML parser) as XML is the OpenOffice
documentation format (I hope I got it right Jacek). He asked me why
Gnome still uses DocBook as XML is more superior to that. He mentioned
that conversion from DocBook to XML should be easy. He also said that
the JAVA based search engine will be open sourced soon in which case if
the Gnome docs would be XML we would get a complete search engine for
the Nautilus Help Browser. 

Indexing and search was scheduled for Gnome 2.0 as I remember Dan's
proposal. Dan's proposal seems to be much wider though as it has
application name, doc title, index based search and body search in it. I
think that indexing the most important of them though.

I don't know much about XML vs DocBook issues so I couldnt answer
Jacek's main question (why still DocBook?).

Jacek is not on the mailing list so please keep him in the loop in any
reply as probably he is the one eho would answer most of the questions
related to this issue.

Thanks,

Laszlo