Re: DOCBOOK: Re: RFE 472229: Allow HTML Tables in DocBook

[Giuseppe Greco <giuseppe.greco@fantastic.com>]

Michael,

you probably have a virus!

I'm receiving this mail continuosly...

Giusepe

On Thu, 2001-12-06 at 09:51, Michael Smith wrote:
> Eduardo Gutentag <eduardo.gutentag@sun.com> writes:
> 
> > Norman Walsh wrote:
> > > 
> > > / Eduardo Gutentag <eduardo.gutentag@sun.com> was heard to say:
> > > | Option 2 [Instead of using namespaces, limit users to having
> > > *either* HTML tables *or* CALS tables in a doc instance, but not both]
> > > makes much more sense to me.
> > > 
> > > Why?
> > 
> > Aw shoot, I had to speak up, didn't I?
> > 
> > Off the top of my head:
> > a) because historically Docbook never attempted to get ahead of future 
> > tools or sooner-or-later use cases
> >
> > [...]
> > 
> > e) because tools vendors (i.e. editor vendors) would probably have a much
> > harder time implementing option 1 than option 2.
> 
> It seems like a big benefit we'd get from allowing HTML tables in
> DocBook is that we could then use existing WYSIWYG HTML editors to
> graphically create and edit tables, instead of marking them up
> completely by hand (e.g., not using one of the commercial XML editors
> that support WYSIWYG editing of CALS tables.)
> 
> I don't know much about WYSWIG table-editing support in commercial
> HTML editing apps, but I do know that Amaya, the W3C's open-source
> HTML browser/editor, lets you create and edit valid XHTML tables
> graphically. (And do WYSWIG editing of SVG graphics and MathML too.)
> 
> I think a lot of DocBook users would find it very useful to be able to
> do WYSWIG table editing in Amaya or some other application, and then
> just cut-and-paste the table markup into Emacs/PSGML or whatever XML
> editing app they use.
> 
> And maybe it'll be easier for some of the nascent open-source WYSIWYG
> XML editing apps (like Yann Dirson and Benjamin Drieu's ThotBook[1],
> Daniel Naber's XML plugin[2] for KDE's Kate, and Richard Moore's
> KDE-associate XMLElegance[3]) to get off the ground if they only need
> to deal with HTML tables (initially at least) and not with CALS.
> 
> I think the namespace option will be the way to go when the common
> tools can handle it. But it seems like it wouldn't gain us much until
> it's supported by more applications. For the short term at least, the
> either-HTML-or-CALS option seems more practical and useful to me.
> 
> 
> [1] http://www.freesoftware.fsf.org/thotbook/
>     http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/thotbook/
>     http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/200109/msg00109.html
> 
> [2] http://www.danielnaber.de/tmp/
> 
> [3] http://www.ipso-facto.demon.co.uk/development/xmelegance/xmelegance.html
> 
>