LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Dan Shearer <dan@shearer.org>
  To  : linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
  Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 16:06:21 +0930 (CST)

Re: DocBook Presentation (perhaps)

On Wed, 21 Jun 2000, Glen Turner wrote:

> > For those that don't know, DocBook is the accepted standard for writing
> > documentation for the Linux Documentation Project.
> 
> It's also used by O'Reilly for their books.  The source for their book
> "DocBook: the definative guide" is on the web.

Docbook (and XML) are excellent ways to describe and transport
information meant for human reading in one form or another.
Unfortunately it is for most people a very bad way of expressing
themselves. In other words, XML is a machine-friendly transport format but
at the same time extremely author-unfriendly. 

This doesn't matter if you are using some graphical "we do it all for you"
program to generate and handle XML. But if you aren't (and there are very
good reasons why authors might not want it that way) then you are in for a
rough time.

Bruised Dan

-- 
LinuxSA WWW: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/  IRC: #linuxsa on irc.linux.org.au
To unsubscribe from the LinuxSA list:
  mail linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au with "unsubscribe" as the subject