Re: Docbook notes

On Thursday 31 July 2003 17:12, Bram Moolenaar wrote:
> It's not difficult at all to use WYSIWYG in the correct way.  Just use
> paragraphs with a meaningful style and use text properties like
> "userinput" instead of italic.

That kind of semantic markup is important. It also requires you to document 
what kind of element gets what kind of tag when things aren't immediately 
obvious. For example, you use <literal> for all variable names. As far as 
that goes, I'd have to applaud

\def\mysensiblesemanticlayoutitem#1{\textbf{#1}}

and unfortunately, XML docbook doesn't support that in a straightforward way, 
since you need to hack the DTD among other things to do it.


> The problem is, of course, that such a program does not appear to exist.
> Even though it would be perfectly possible to create it (Oce was
> creating it while I was working there, but it never hit the market).

http://www.ipso-facto.demon.co.uk/development/xmelegance/xmelegance.html

Although from the screenshots it seems development hasn't been recent. What 
looks like a maintained fork of that is

http://apps.kde.com/na/2/info/id/1096

> Hmm, I am currently familiar with a restricted set, but it may grow any
> moment.  Why limit the growth?  If you add some new tag it's easy to
> lookup what it does.  It's the other way around that's complicated:
> wanting to add text in a certain structure and not knowing what tags to
> use.

[ugh, yet another KDE plug] I'd recommend the KDE docbook guide and (semi) 
tutorial, available at http://people.fruitsalad.org/lauri/markup/ (not really 
the official place, but I'm told it'll stick around there pretty much 
forever). If you're going to start writing an XML docbook file, this walks 
you through a fair amount of the boilerplate and also at least documents how 
one project has decided to map the docbook elements to local semantics.


-- 
pub  1024D/FEA2A3FE 2002-06-18 Adriaan de Groot <[email protected]>
     Key fingerprint = 934E 31AA 80A7 723F 54F9  50ED 76AC EE01 FEA2 A3FE



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