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Subject: Re: DOCBOOK: Glossary database


/ Jorge Godoy <godoy@conectiva.com.br> was heard to say:
| On Fri, Jan 28, 2000 at 09:30:39AM -0500, Norman Walsh wrote:
| > (You could do this if you're working in SGML, too, but parsing the
| > source documents wouldn't be as easy (or robust).)
| 
| Are you saying that it's better to work with XML than SGML? What
| string comparisons are you talking about? Uppercase and lowercase?
| Isn't it possible to implement an option such as the "-i" from grep
| that ignores the case? Or using some function that lowercases
| everything? 
| 
| If you make the XML tool I might try to use it in SGML.
| 

XML is more easily amenable to processing, that's the way it was
designed.  If I wrote a tool to do this glossary checking, I'd
almost certainly use an XML DOM implementation to read the
document(s) into memory and locate glossterms. Simple and easy
tools to do this sort of thing don't exist for SGML.

| I've read some articles comparing SGML and XML, but I always thought
| that SGML was better than XML. Am I wrong? Are the DTD's equivalents
| or I'll miss something migrating from SGML to XML? 

Uh, see http://docbook.org/tdg/html/appb.html for a list of the
differences (both in general and specific to DocBook).

XML is SGML. But SGML is not XML. There are tradeoffs. There's
some additional power in SGML, but it adds tremendously to the
complexity of writing tools that deal with SGML. XML is the future.

                                        Cheers,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | In a universe of electrons and
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | selfish genes, blind physical
Member, DocBook Editorial Board    | forces and genetic replication,
                                   | some people are going to get hurt,
                                   | other people are going to get
                                   | lucky, and you won't find any
                                   | rhyme or reason in it, nor any
                                   | justice.--Richard Dawkins



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