Re: [docbook-apps] Google summer of code

[Mike Maxwell <maxwell@umiacs.umd.edu>]

Stefan Seefeld wrote:
> On 03/14/2010 03:26 PM, Mike Maxwell wrote:
>>
>> My sense (which I guess I've voiced a couple times) is that there is 
>> already an awfully lot (too much, IMO) about DB that is specific to 
>> programming languages.  Our localization has over 200 lines like
>> <define name="db.classsynopsis"><notAllowed/></define>
>> My guess is that if you were to add programming elements in a separate 
>> namespace, you would want to move all the existing 
>> programming-specific elements into that namespace too.
> 
> I don't think this is possible without breaking lots of existing 
> documentation.
> 
> If backward-compatibility wasn't an issue, I would very much like the 
> suggestion.

Given that the root element of a DocBook 5 file looks something like
    <chapter xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook";...
is this really a problem?  Couldn't a DB document written for the new 
modular DocBook schema have something like
    <chapter xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/ModDocBook";
or
    <chapter xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook6";...
?  So any documentation written in the Olde DB could continue to use the 
old schema, and not get broken.

At any rate, I would think it would be trivial to port a DB 5 document 
to such a modular docbook, by adding a namespace declaration for 
programming language-specific elements at the top, and prefixing any 
programming language-specific element names with the namespace 
abbreviation.

But maybe I'm missing something...
-- 
    Mike Maxwell
    What good is a universe without somebody around to look at it?
    --Robert Dicke, Princeton physicist