Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Re: DOCBOOK: Minutes: DocBook TechnicalCommitteeMeeting: 21 Aug 2001

[Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz>]

Daniel Veillard wrote:
>   I think that not reusing other specifications under the argument that
> in that case you want to be able to map the associated namespace prefix
> to any values would be a really hard position to defend. I hope that's
> not what you are suggesting. But I understand that the initial work of
> merging DTDs is not very fun nor easy.

But if we stay with DTDs how many variants we should produce?

DocBook + XLink or
DocBook + MathML or
DocBook + SVG or
DocBook + XLink + SVG or
DocBook + SVG + myOwnML or
...

There are too many possibilites. As far as merging of DTDs cann't be
automated, going DTDs way to support other markup schemes than DocBook
in DocBook documents is not long term solution (but may be used if you
need MathML or SVG in your document right now). My personal opinion
about DocBook future is to let it be single DTD, doing linking and
inclusion by DocBook's elements. When there will be more tools
supporting namespaces and validation of document against schemas for
more than one namespace, everyone can use DocBook with all additional
namespaces he/she wants without need to do costly manual merge of DTDs.
This would be first time we can start thinking of using XLink instead of
ulink and possibly other elements. (I am looking forward for outputs
about NS support from following DocBook TC meetings.)

						Jirka

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  Jirka Kosek  	                     
  e-mail: jirka@kosek.cz
  http://www.kosek.cz