Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: The DocBook Affair - Part 2

[Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@canada.com>]

If this rant was rendered in DocBook, I'd put it on my website as
positive proof that "misery loves company" ;) Patrick, I agree 100%,
but I also know that we have no sacred rights to Easy DocBook; it will
only happen if we all make it happen.  Open Source is like that.

IMHO, the trouble with SGML in general and DocBook in particular is
that, while large corporate shops apparently solved all these issues
long, long ago with expensive corporate publishing systems, we common
people have only very recently (a) had the hardware worth of
attempting it and (b) thanks to Norm and others, had the first free
implementations to toy with.  The ancient corporate SGML work has left
behind a huge corpus of cob-websites with just enough tantelizing
information to suggest we are on the right archaeological track, but,
like most archaeology, many of the references and links point to
crumbled vases and burned libraries.

SGML/DocBook is not like TeX/LaTeX who both had their roots in free
implementations. This is more like GCC which appeared nearly 4 years
after the first commercial C compilers and took another 4 years of FSF
development before it conquered the halls of corporate computing.
(just in time to be usurped by the Windows Myth and MSC, which set all
of computing on hold for another 10 years).  Decent bundled manuals,
bundled libraries, useful GUI toolkits, RAD applications, bookstore
offerings and distribution packages for creating software with gcc
(with all due respect to the fine work of the FSF) did not appear
until Linux became mainstream in 1998, 14 years after the gcc first
became public; in all the years in between, you were welcome to use
gcc (and many of us did) but we were largely on our own for support
and tools.

As to Q#5, OpenJade is an open source re-write of Jade; because it is
open source, ordinary people such as ourselves have the opportunity to
participate to save posterity from The DocBook Affair II.

-- 
Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@canada.com>  TeleDynamics Communications Inc
Business Innovations Through Open Source Systems: http://www.teledyn.com
"Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers."(Pablo Picasso)