Re: What is GNOME office?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Daniel Veillard <Daniel Veillard w3 org> writes: 
>   I noticed something in your answer which raised my attention, it
> was "round tripping Docbook". How complete is this ? Is this based on the
> XML Docbook DTD or the SGML version ? I sent a query to the XML-Dev list
> about free Docbook editors and the only hint I got back was about a KWrite
> patch. How long do you think it would take to have something suitable for
> the GNOME doc team (including some non-trivial thing like external parsed
> entities and/or validation) ?
> 

Dave has always been strongly opposed to this type of DocBook editor,
because a word processor uses visual not semantic markup, so you don't
get semantic tags for use in searching, readers for the blind, etc.

Basically, just like a visual HTML editor, you get crap SGML when you
use this type of editor.

Something like Conglomerate at least allows you to apply the semantic
tags.

I agree with Dave - I don't think using a visual editor to write
DocBook is a very good idea, basically - at that point there's no
reason to do them in DocBook, you might as well just do them in HTML
or RTF or native AbiWord format, and use AbiWord print and HTML export
to get the various output formats.

If you try to use DocBook as a word processor file format, it will
just be a bad one. It should be used as semantic markup if you're
going to bother using it.

Havoc