Re: [xwt-users]Introduction to XWT

Although this isn't my area I may be able to add a
bit, then again maybe not, read at your own risk.


--- Adam Megacz <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Charles Goodwin <[email protected]> writes:
> > > What benefit would Gentoo's XML bring us (other
> than buzzword compliancee)?
> 
> > 1) simple (which it is),
> 
> HTML is simple.

 Maybe, maybe not depends on what you want to do.


> 
> > 2) can be exported to DocBook,
> 
> Why should I care about this?

 (Long response)

 Adam I suspect you already know this but I will go
over it again simply to provide a baseline. XML is
really good at providing a description of the data
that a document contains. A well done schema will
allough you to programatically search on individual
document elements, or automatically transform one
element to another. Html and xHTML only provide a
description of how the data should look not the data
itself.

 This provides some serious long term benefits once
your document store gets larger. There are also a few
short term benefits.
  
  XML provides for the transformation from one output
format to another very easily.  So if you want html
you write and XSL to provide it, same if you want pdf
or postscript or whatever. Best part of all is that
xsl is pretty simple to write.

  XML makes searching documents much simpler. What if
you want a document that contains 'Snuzzelfarb' in the
abstract? With html you can search for any document
with the word 'Snuzzelfarb' in it but you couldn't
search for that in just the subject. To give a more
complete example, recently I used google to search for
information on the Clean langauge (lazy, fast,
functional langauge with ugly sytax). In google if you
search on that word you get 17,800,000 results. I
eventually got down to the pages I wanted with some
acrobatics, but it would have been much simpler if I
could have searched for the word clean in a title
element and programming langauge in a subject element.
Not only is that a better search but its also easier
as well.

 The single greatest long term benifit occures when
you get quite a few documents in place. Here the
search capabilities really come into play. The other
area that really shines with xml is document
management. You never know when you might want to show
the first three paragraphs of every result in a look
up. You just can't do that reliably.

 As for the benefits of docbook. It is simply a widely
accepted standard for documentation. It has pre-built
tooks for converting to several types of html, pdf,
postscript, latex, etc. Not only that but as new
popular types of output so up, no doubt new converters
will show up. Its also quite a bit simpler then html,
easy to learn and easy to use.

So I guess in my opinion, the biggest benifit of xml
is flexability, you just don't get that with html.

> > HTML
> 
> HTML can be exported to HTML using this nifty
> utility called 'cat'.

 But it may be difficult to port to anything else. 
 
> 
> > and hence PS/PDF through one of the above)
> 
> HTML can be exported to ps/pdf; the w3c's specs come
> out quite nicely.

 As long as the you want the pdf/ps to look like the
html, which is not often the case in my experience.

> 
> > and 3) the Gentoo docs really look really nice.
> 
> Well, personally I think the reference looks
> cleaner/better right now
> than the gentoo docs, but there's nothing in the
> gentoo docs you can't
> do with CSS.


 True, and I am not familiar with Gentoo. But there is
allot of stuff that you can do with xml based
documentation that you just can't do with other types.

> 
> ...
> 
> I'm not trying to be argumentative here, but HTML
> *is already* SGML
> (and XHTML is already XML), which means that
> translating it into other
> forms of SGML is very easy.  And the huge benefit is
> that:
> 
>   1) Everybody already knows HTML.

 Thats a huge assumption, most techies do but thats
about it.
 
>   2) Your document is "instantly viewable" without
> running it through
>      some tool.  Which, btw, Charlie, is why I
> haven't bothered to
>      read your tutorial yet.

  You should provide already converted outputs. This
is what you do in code, why not documentation.

> For a document at the complexity level of the
> reference (very low
> compared to something like a book), all the XML/SGML
> formats are
> essentially interchangeable.  I think we should use
> the one that's
> easiest to edit and view as the primary format and
> translate into the
> others on an as-needed basis.

 Probably not a bad idea.

> 
> If you guys want to switch to strict/validated XHTML
> for the
> reference, I'm fine with that.  Then we're just an
> XSL away from any
> other format your heart desires...
> 

 Ah, but you don't get anything for this. You might
was well just go with any of the html standards. The
key to using xml is knowing whats in the document.

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