Re: Links in DocBook XML

Simo Melenius wrote:

> Peter Flynn wrote:
> 
>> Steven T. Hatton wrote:
>>>I have been carrying on a discussion with some folks on the DocBook
>>>mailing list regarding the use of XML and CSS, without any XSLT
>>>transformation to XHTML.
> ...
>> Quite how Netscape, Mozilla, IE, Opera, and the rest have dropped the
>> ball so badly is not clear, but it is utterly inexcusable that ten
>> years after the technology was in daily production use as a plugin,
>> we still don't have anything even remotely near it in a production
>> browser (with the exception of DocZilla, of course, which is based
>> on the same technology [Synex] used in Panorama).
> 
> Do you mind if I bring up a correction here, albeit being a bit late
> :-)
> 
> The Synex thing has confused people before, too. That's probably
> because of Citec's past with Synex and its Synex-based browser,
> MultiDoc Pro. However, it was exactly because Synex disappeared from
> the market why DocZilla is _not_ based on Synex technology. Hence,
> Citec had to build another browser based on another technology to
> support their SGML browser option, and the decision was to start from
> the Mozilla codebase.

I do apologise: I thought DocZilla supported the Synex .entityrc and 
stylesheets.

> Currently, DocZilla is pretty much Mozilla Navigator with SGMLish
> twists. It uses the standard Mozilla Gecko layout engine to display
> SGML using CSS (or CSS2-ish, as implemented by Mozilla.org) as the
> styling language. But to load and parse SGML, it embeds OpenSP (the
> reincarnation of J. Clark's SP parser, used in nsgmls) which is a
> strictly validating SGML parser with full support for DTDs and entity
> resolution through catalogs. Together with a few SGML/XML specific
> features, like support for commonly used subset of HyTime, you can
> probably call it a true SGML browser despite the fact that it isn't
> written in the 90's and not based on Synex :-)

Thanks for the clarification, and full marks to DocZilla for doing it
right. 

(Still doesn't excuse the other browser-makers for failing to make
the grade, though :-)

///Peter