Re: Texinfo and DocBook

[Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow mit edu>]

jim@jimpick.com writes:
> 
> 
> Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@mit.edu> writes:
> 
> > I'm impressed that you've been able to get a simple demo going so
> > fast, even if it is crude. I think we should start a mailing list for
> > this project, as there appears to be interest from many directions,
> > including but not limited to people from Gnome, Debian and Cygnus. Can
> > anyone set this up? I can do it, but I'm not sure how
> > permanent/reliable an address I can procure.
> 
> I can set one up as well.  But it would be nicer to have one running
> off the gnome or gnu servers, I think.
>  
> > As for the code, gnomecvs is probably a fine place for it. But maybe
> > we should think about implementation technology a bit more before
> > going off too much. I don't know any of {Texinfo,DocBook,DSSSL} very
> > well myself, but people have mentioned several fairly different
> > implementation strategies. We should inform ourselves and figure out
> > which one is the best.
> 
> I do like DSSSL, because it is purpose built for this sort of thing.
> The language is limited in scope, so you tend to do things the right
> way.
> 
> The drawback to DSSSL is that there is very little documentation
> available for it.  The best documentation is in the draft ISO spec,
> which is very dry reading.  There is some introductory material on the
> net, but it is very incomplete.
> 
> On the plus side, Norm Walsh has already done most of the hard stuff
> for DocBook - we just have to hack it here and there.
> 

I agree that DSSSL is at least part of the way to go, but it may be
better to add a backend to Jade in addition to a style sheet, or to
follow Mark Gallassi's suggestion and write a DTD for Texinfo. I'd
much prefer DSSSL to perl (another suggested solution), as I know
Scheme pretty well already.


 - Maciej

PS sorry about the lost subejct line, my mailer got confused somehow.