Re: [docbook] Furthering support for "existing standards"

[Scott Hudson <scott.hudson@flatironssolutions.com>]

WRT further support for existing standards, it has also been discussed 
on the TC whether to explicitly add support for Dublin Core metadata in 
info...

The Publishers SC has decided to explicitly add support in the 
Publishers customization, but that has not been carried over to the full 
standard... yet...

Best regards,

--Scott

Tony Rogers wrote:
> **** NOTE :* First time poster.  Sorry for any unintentional 
> blasphemies, heresies, and/or sacrileges. O:-)
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I started playing with DocBook when version 5 was in a Release Candidate 
> (RC) status.  One thing that I immediately noticed was that it replaced 
> (or modified) existing linking structures to use XLink.  This pleased 
> me.  Then I read the following quote from the Transition Guide (after 
> Example 2 under "Relaxing with DocBook" 
> <http://www.docbook.org/docs/howto/#introduction-rng>): "As you can see, 
> DocBook V5.0 is built on top of existing XML standards as much as 
> possible."  This is great stuff.
> 
> I would like to see this thinking pushed even further.  I was working on 
> the documentation for an open-source project the other day, and I was 
> stricken with the amount of copy-pasted markup for author information. 
>  I thought to myself, "Well, why don't we just put all the authors in 
> one file and reference them?"  
> 
> And then I thought: 
> 
>    1. "Well, since the <author> element contains contact info for a
>       person or an organization, and 
>    2. the VCard standard contains contact information for a person or
>       organization, 
>    3. wouldn't it be great if I could just put all the authors / editors
>       / etc. in one directory as Vcards and then put something like
>       <author vcard="doe.john.vcf" /> in the DocBook source?"
> 
> 
> Benefits:
> 
>    1. Info for authors / editors / etc. would not be become inconsistent
>       across multiple files
>    2. Easier for editors working on <authors> in DocBook, since they
>       simply reference a Vcard
>    3. Easier for authors, since they only have to worry about updating
>       their Vcard, rather than a potentially long list of items like "I
>       wrote this chapter, and this chapter, but not this chapter; and I
>       wrote this section within this chapter…" and so on.
>    4. Reuses an existing standard.
> 
> 
> Well, Vcards are an existing standard; but upon revisiting the quote I 
> cited earlier, it says "DocBook V5.0 is built on top of existing *XML* 
> standards as much as possible."  
> 
> No problem.  See Representing vCard Objects in RDF/XML 
> <http://www.w3.org/TR/vcard-rdf> for RDF/XML; and the subsection 
> "6. vCard in XML <http://www.w3.org/TR/vcard-rdf#6>" deals with Vcards 
> as XML without the RDF.  (See also "XEP-0054: vcard-temp 
> <http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0054.html>", the XML spec for Vcards 
> "in the Jabber community.")
> 
> Bonus points if this could also be accomplished with FOAF 
> <http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/> as well!  (Example:  <author 
> vcard="doe.john.vcf" foaf="doe.john.foaf" />)
> 
> 
> —Tony