Re: (sgml vs XML)+indexing

[John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net>]

Laszlo -
This is a very good question. Jacek is right, there are great
advantages to moving to DocBook 4 XML, but we decided during the
summer to not make the move immediately because the tools for use by
the GDP writers were not mature enough.

Here's a link to a note on the docs list from last July:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-doc-list/2000-July/msg00052.html
(I recall other discussion, but cannot find it - can anyone else find
a reference to help Jacek and Laszlo?)

As it turns out, the decisions is biting us a bit now with Nautilus
and gnome-db2html2, but I think we need to stick with it for the 1.4
release. My hope is that after 1.4 is out, we can make the
switch. Converting our documents to xml is trivial, and as Jacek
notes, there are some benefits to be had.

On Wed, Oct 25, 2000 at 02:56:54PM +0100, Laszlo Kovacs wrote:
> 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. 

This sounds great!

> 
> 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.
> 

Cheers,
-- 
John Fleck
jfleck inkstain net (h)
jfleck abqjournal com (w)
http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/
http://www.abqjournal.com/scitech/