[geeks] Three heads

[Gregory Leblanc]

On 08 Aug 2001 00:49:32 -0400, joshua d boyd wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 07, 2001 at 04:13:38PM -0700, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> > One more option for large documents...  DocBook.  www.docbook.org is
> > where I look for info.  Since this list is hosed at sunhelp.org, I
> > should point out that the AnswerBooks, as well as the Solaris man pages,
> > are done is SolBook, which is a variation on DocBook.  I expect that the
> > rest of the industry will be following before too long, especially as
> > decent XML editors come to market.  (Compaq already has some stuff this
> > way, as does O'Reilly).  Later,
> 
> I've been wondering, what constitutes a decent XML editor?

Well, that pretty much depends on whether you're a content author, or a
programmer, or whatnot.  Here's what I can come up with offhand.  First,
the editor HAS to know the DTD that you're using.  That is, it has to
read the DTD file, parse it, and use that information in the editing
window.  I think that editing XML like some web people edit HTML will be
the best/most flexible solution.  If you've looked at things like
Homesite from Allaire (sp?), it's got one window for the "raw" html
markup, plus a "preview" window.  Since DocBook is semantic based,
there's no reason to have a WYSIWYG type editing mode.  Instead, in the
markup mode, you need to have buttons and context menus, and all that
jazz, for inserting elements.  I think that the "preview" mode is
important since most people haven't really learned to mark things based
on content rather than presentation.

At the moment, the only decent XML/SGML tool that I know of is psgml,
for Emacs.  It gives you a list of elements, tab completes them,
shortcuts for closing tags, and has a "basic" validator built in.  There
are a few things it could do better, and there's not really any way to
get a "preview" of what your doc could look like once it's published.  

> TeX is nice, but from what I've heard DocBook in some ways might be
> better.  I wonder how well it handles specialized notations like math and
> music though.  TeX handles those well (with the proper packages of
> course).

I'm not sure about music, but DocBook can easily embed MathML markup,
which is an XML DTD designed for doing mathematics.  I have no idea how
rendering of that stuff works, as I do mostly software documentation at
this point, and there's not a lot of math.  If anybody wants to know
more about this, let me know, I've got lots of good links, and, uhm, I
like to talk.  :-)
	Greg