Re: DOCBOOK: Re: Subsets anyone?

[Michael Smith <smith@xml-doc.org>]

"Matt G." <matt_g_@hotmail.com> writes:

> >From: "Steven T. Hatton" <hattons@speakeasy.net>
> >To: docbook@lists.oasis-open.org
> >Subject: DOCBOOK: Subsets anyone?
> >Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2002 14:05:36 -0400
> >
> ...
> > I began to build a 'master' document for the documents I have.  My
> > documents are currently books.
> ...
> >I realized I wanted to form a global document to hold all these books.
> > So I started to make a set.  I then realized that I actually wanted
> > a set for each subject, and then a set of all sets.
> 
> This has come up, before.  Personally, I'm a little skeptical that
> what people really want is to combine all of their books and sets
> (even those covering different topics) into a single document.

I'm also a little curious about the need. Perhaps it's driven by a
desire to have some way to facilitate cataloging of the content, or
building a directory of some kind for the content.

But DocBook is not itself a system for marking up catalogs or
directoris of content.

I can understand the need to express relationships among different
books (or whatever). But we've got metadata elements that provide a
means to express those relationships. If you start trying to express
the groupings solely through gathering them together in a single hiearchy
in your source, well, it seems like there's no end to it -- first we add
markup for modeling a set of sets, next somebody wants markup for sets
of sets of sets... in the end, things just dissolve in chaos, and the
communists use it as an opportunity to step in and take things over,
or martial law ends up getting imposed to keep that from happening.

  --Mike