Re: Successor to DocBook

[Karl Eichwalder <ke suse de>]

Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> writes:

> Why not just give all the elements simple and consistent names
> to begin with?  Nobody can even remember the DocBook elements,
> so what's the point of catering to that experience?

The good thing about DocBook is, that it is by now an accepted standard
in the free software and open source community.  Many developers and
writers are sufficiently enough familiar with the DocBook markup.  Even
if some element names are weird, it might make sense to keep them
because we have learnt them (and beginners can learn them as well
without too much trouble).

Yes, I'm quite conservative.  I'd say we should wait another 10 years
before start to push the next DTD/Schema onto the community.  ATM, the
problem is not the markup per se, but the lack of a free XML editor.  We
need a combination of oxygen and emacs (psgml/nxml/xml).

> As for existing tools, no existing tool is going to get the
> link mapping correct.  You might get some formatting fluff
> for free, but that sort of stuff is labor cheap compared to
> the rest of the work involved.

There is some truth about your statement.  But do not forget that
people have written keyboard macros and editor extensions to make
DocBook editing less cumbersome.  There are also DocBook converters.  So
more tools exist than just formatting tools.

Yeah, DITA is complex...  but it is topic oriented.

> People seem to think that this is nothing more than simpler
> DocBook.  It's not.  It has nothing to do with DocBook, and
> there's no reason to pretend it does.  I should call it MIND:
> MIND Is Not DocBook.

;)  I still believe that DooBook is good enough.  If you want "topics"
use unnumbered section elements; if special link tags are actually
missing, import them using namespaces.

-- 
Karl Eichwalder
R&D / Documentation                         SUSE Linux Products GmbH

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