Re: Open Document Environment (ODE)

[Matthew Wilson <mwilson@real.com>]

Hey everyone,

> 1) Having one specific format (Docbook for example) is great from an
> indexing and searching perspecitive.  As the person in charge of the
> LKBP's search engine, I've given a lot of thought to how I can make the
> searches more meaningful to the user and more accurate.  One of the
> biggest improvements in this area come when you have a standard format
> such as Docbook and then give your search engine the intelligence to
> understand it.  It's also a lot of work :)

I agree that having one format is essential to the success of any
documentation system.  However, as it seems that sgml-tools is no longer
being supported (I tried every version on my clean slackware box, and
*none* of them would compile/install/work) Perhaps we should try to move
away from SGML/DocBook, and go with XML.  Although XML is still in it's
infancy, I believe that it would be an excellent platform to develop
documentation with.

XML is an open standard, heavily supported by many in the computer
industry.  Even the next generation of web browsers will be able to read
it natively to some degree.  It's also highly structured, designed from
the beginning to be processed into other forms.  All we would need to do
is pick/create a suitable DTD.

As for DocBook/Linuxdoc in sgml, since the current bulk of LDP
documentation is in sgml, perhaps we would need either a conversion effort
(automated?) or a grandfathering system.

The whole point is that I think that we should not rely on software that
is no longer being maintained (as sgml-tools has not been for some time)
especially when so many people have so much trouble installing it. (I'm
not the only one)

Matthew


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