RE: DOCBOOK: Date in PCDATA?

[Laurie Mann <laurie.mann@ansys.com>]

> Norm said:
/ Laurie Mann <laurie.mann@ansys.com> was heard to say:
| >From: Jorge Godoy [mailto:godoy@conectiva.com]
| >> "Norman" == Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> writes: 
| >>    Norman> I added an RFE for it.
| >It would be intersting to have an RFE for a <today /> too. 
| >It could be used like the \today in LaTeX to print the date >a document
| >was converted to any other format. It coulde be even made in >a group of
| tags:
| 
| I think this is a great idea.  Please make it so!  ;->

>Anyone can contribute to the RFE database, 
>http://www.docbook.org/rfe/
>
>I personally think <today/> is a really bad idea. The day on >which a
document is printed is irrelevant.

Not necessarily.  When you send documents out for review,
it can be VERY HELPFUL to know when you printed it off.

>What's important is *when was it
>last modified*. For this, I think entities serve just fine:
>
><!DOCTYPE ... [
><!ENTITY last-modified-year "2000">
><!ENTITY last-modified-month "Aug">
><!ENTITY last-modified-day "07">
><!-- or even, let CVS/RCS handle it -->
><!ENTITY last-modified "$Id$">
>]>

Would you need to touch the DTD every time you wanted
to print a date, or could you defined this in an
entities file?  (Actually, it looks like you 
could put the entity definitions into the driver...)

>I'll further point out that some formatting systems don't 
>even provide
>*access* to the current date, so it would not be possible, 
>in the general case, to support <today/>.

When I read things like this, I REALLY miss TeX!