Re: debiandoc-sgml vs. docbook
Michael Alan Dorman <mdorman-debian-policy@debian.org> writes:
> If I write documentation for Debian, it'll be in DocBook---and maybe
> my first project should be a nice introduction---but it seems like
> debiandoc-sgml is not the evolutionary dead end I had thought it to
> be.
Someone is going to shoot me for this, but perhaps what Debian should
create is a SGML Formal Architecture for it's documentation. This is
something like a Meta-DTD. So imagine if you took the debiandoc DTD,
and took that as your basic requirements for documentation, and then
be defining that as a formal architecture you could have mechanisms
for translating Docbook to DebianDoc and SGML parsers which support
SGML Architectures could do the validation and transformations for
you.
Check out the HyTime standard which introduces SGML architectures, and
is itself an example of them. http://www.hytime.org.
This would not be exposed to users who just use the debiandoc-dtd, but
it would give us a structure for incorporating all the other DTD, both
XML and SGML that come along via a standard SGML extension.
Reply to: