Re: Documentation Mailing Lists and Newgroups

[mark@xxxxxxxxxx (Mark Valentine)]

In article <1062611340.887653@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Sander Vesik  <sander@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>Mark Valentine <mark@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> In article <1062437965.492707@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
>> Sander Vesik  <sander@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>DocBook XML is "basicly" the same as BocBook SGML, with some very
>>>minor differences.
>> 
>> Well, it seems to me that those <em/minor/ differences might just make the
>> extremely noisy markup syntax a little more bearable (though it's true that
>> they probably don't really help readability very much after all)...
>
>Just to clarify - the differences between the xml and sgml versions are that
>some exclusions present in teh sgml version aren't in the xml version 
>(because xml doesn't have exclusions). The amrkup tags and attributes are 
>teh same. 

I was trying to point out the syntactical differences, e.g. in XML you need
<em>minor</em> rather than <em/minor/ or even <em>minor</> (of course it makes
a lot more difference with the longer tag names typical in DocBook)...

For example, FreeBSD's man-refs.ent uses SGML short tags and the syntax is
already too verbose:

    <citerefentry/<refentrytitle/awk/<manvolnum/1//

In XML this becomes:

    <citerefentry>
      <refentrytitle>awk</refentrytitle>
      <manvolnum>1</manvolnum>
    </citerefentry>

That's a painful way to say "awk(1)"!  (It's ".Xr awk 1" in mdoc, for example.)

Although I do make use of exclusions currently, I could probably do the same
job just using attributes (but not if I have to customise DocBook XML heavily
to add my own attributes - I haven't looked yet to see how likely this might
be).

		Cheers,

		Mark.
-- 
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