Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: SGML vs XML

[Paul Grosso <pgrosso@arbortext.com>]

At 17:35 2002 07 30 +0200, Jirka Kosek wrote:
>Trevor Jenkins wrote:
>
>> > There's a suggested workaround here [4], [5].
>> > [4] http://www.dpawson.co.uk/docbook/styling/profiling.html
>> > [5] http://www.kosek.cz/xml/dboscon/profiling/frames.html
>> 
>> Thanks for those links. I lost them in a recent system failure. But this
>> "profiling" technique is, I believe, an obfuscation and that's something
>> that working on SGML has taught me to eschew. It has it's place but not in
>> the depths of a 500+ page manual.
>
>It works for documents with virtually any length. And there is also one
>advantage -- if you want conditional processing you are not forced to
>learn new syntax (SGML conditional sections) you just use attribute with
>some value.

I admit I haven't read the refs, but relative to marked sections, there
are limitations to using elements/attributes for profiling.

If the DTD requires exactly one title per chapter, there is no way using
element/attribute "profiling" that you can have two alternatives for the
title depending on the profiling, because that won't be allowed by the DTD.

With marked sections (organized so that only one of the marked section
keyword parameters evaluate to INCLUDE at any given time), you don't have
this problem.

paul