Re: Questions about switching to Docbook 4.1 XML

[John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net>]

On Wed, Oct 24, 2001 at 11:42:57AM +0100, Pat Costello wrote:
> Hi All, 
> 
> There have been lots of messages on the mailing list recently about the move to 
> XML. What will happen to documentation that is already in sgml with the existing 
> DocBook 1.1 PNG DTD? Do all of these manuals need to be converted, or are they 
> still usable? If everything does need to be converted, is there a conversion 
> tool? Would the proposed optional tagging for graphics prevent automatic 
> conversion? 
> 

The old sgml stuff should work. Daniel has added the ability to handle
DocBook sgml to libxml2. Converting to xml is in most cases easy,
however, and we probably should do it. There is no tool - perhaps
someone could come up with an easy script in Perl or something that
handles the majority of the cases.

Changing the graphics as suggested by Eric is less trivial in terms of
the grunt work involved, and we can avoid it, leaving the <graphic>
tag (as long as we add the closing "/" to make it
XML-compliant). However, we then lose the accessibility benefit of the
<textobject>.

Cheers,
-- 
John Fleck
jfleck inkstain net (h), http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/
"Any man left on the Rio Grande is the King of the World as far as I know."
 - Becker and Fagen, 1973