Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Docbook Structuring Problems

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ Bob Stayton <bobs@sco.com> was heard to say:
| If you include DOCTYPEs in your modular files, you need
| a program to assemble modules and strip them out.
| If you leave out the DOCTYPE declarations in your modular
| files, you have to temporarily insert it to validate the
| module.

Yeah, it's a mess. In XML, the XInclude mechanism might give us
a less irksome solution (though I'm by no means sure it'll be
simpler in any real sense).

| I remember hearing about "entity managers" years ago
| as the solution to modular content.  There are some commercial
| products (I think Arbortext Epic for one) that make this
| easier, at a price.  There are even SGML object databases
| that will handle fragments and assemble instances
| from the database.  

Yep, one of the nice things about Epic (disclaimer: I used to
work for Arbortext) is that it can edit chunks that aren't
technically legal (it uses a doctype declaration hidden in a
comment). Then you can stitch these together as you wish.

But in a heterogenous system, that isn't a good answer since
other tools don't understand the commented decl.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Nearly every complex solution to a
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | programming problem that I have
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | looked at carefully has turned out
                                   | to be wrong.--Brent Welch