Re: Playing with the spec

["Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@MIT.EDU>]

   From: <Hugo.van.der.Kooij@caiw.nl>
   Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2000 20:50:29 +0100 (CET)

   > Unfortunately, the tools for processing Docbook SGML seem to suck
   > rocks.  You can't generate pretty-printed text files from the SGML, like
   > you can with Linuxdoc.

   You can. It took some people less then an evening to start from no sgml
   experience to mention to get it running with a RPM package.

Great.  Can you explain to me how, or send me pointers to documentation
that doesn't suck?  Most of the documentation out there describes the
SGML format; it doesn't explain the process from soup to nuts, or
mention that the some of the SGML tools don't properly handle all of
Docbook constructs, or how to drive the various SGML tools to do the
right thing.

I spent a lot of time trying to fight with the SGML tools to make them
do what I wanted them to do, and in the end, I simply wasn't impressed.
The separation between the format and the tools is perhaps great from an
abstract, computer science point of view, but it's less than useful from
the point of view of a user who's trying to write some text and have it
come out nicely in one of several formats: TeX, text, and HTML.

If you say that if that's all I want to do, I'm missing the point of
SGML, then perhaps I should be using something else.  The current set of
SGML tools simply don't do a good job at this, or at least the
documentation is complete garbage.  (Take a look at the documentation
for Jade if you want a good example of this.  What's there is completely
useless from the point of the view of a user who doesn't care about
DSSSL, but just wants to get work done.)

						- Ted