Re: DOCBOOK: DocBook vs OpenOffice.org

[Daniel Veillard <veillard@redhat.com>]

On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 02:58:57AM +0100, Florian Brunner wrote:
> Ok, I know that OpenOffice.org is a whole application suite, but I meant 
> actually only the word processing part. It's also "simply a bunch of text 
> surrounded by XML tags" which in addition happens to know how to format 
> itself. But since its file-format is XML you can also transform it easily 
> (more or less) to other output formats. So again my questions:
> What would be the advantages of using DocBook instead of OpenOffice.org? What 
> the disadvantages?
> For what task would you suggest the one and for what the other?

  Hum, from my recolection of reading the OO XML specification, it
seems to be at a lower semantic level than DocBook markup, i.e. it's
more close to serializing OO internal datastructure than a generic
markup intended to encapsulate a lot of information about the text
been marked up. That's relatively logical, OO interface doesn't 
ask you for logical information about the text being input. So OO
composition is "easier" but encapsulate less semantic. So I would
target OO format when you intend to use OO to maintain the document
and rather DocBook if you intend to use the document as a source for
various documentation and metadata processes.

Daniel

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