Re: [docbook] Loss of faith -- somewhat rantish

[Thomas Nichols <nx10mail@yahoo.co.uk>]

At 13:38 13/07/2003 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

>On Sun, 13 Jul 2003, Dave Pawson wrote:
>
> > At 23:39 13/07/2003 +0930, Michael Talbot-Wilson wrote:
> > >There are two kinds person in the world, the kind that denounces the
> > >need to learn a thing, and the kind that knuckles down and learns it.
> >
> > Mmmm. except that you need to appreciate that you don't know / 
> understand it,
> > in order to denounce it?
>
>there are three kinds of people in the world:  those who can count,
>and those who can't.
>
>rday


"There are 10 types of IT people. Those who understand binary and those who 
don't."
-- Sam Garforth.

 From a perspective of sadly limited understanding, the lack of a 
co-ordinated collective effort to produce a standardized "system" for 
editing DocBook and generating HTML/PDF output seems to have led to a 
diverse array of independent efforts; though this is not of itself a Bad 
Thing, I personally miss a "reference implementation". I know of many IMHO 
excellent projects - for example XAE for (X)Emacs, at 
http://xae.sunsite.dk/ , or the WineHQ resources, or the Ant tools for 
DocBook - but very few (none?) seem feature complete, suitable for a 
non-technician, well supported and in widespread use.  There are many 
resources I find useful for setting up a "DocBook-XML environment", such as 
Ashley Mills' excellent site[1], Dave Pawson's definitive FAQs[2] and the 
recent piece on DocBook for Windows from Jim Crafton[3]. However, I still 
find setting up such an environment to be far from straightforward, and 
this is puzzling to me. I wonder whether a collaborative effort to produce 
an OOTB DocBook-generation setup, with minimal dependencies on other 
installed kit (i.e. containing its own versions of such packages, as does 
XAE) and endorsed by the alumni of this list might propel wider adoption?

DocBook *editing* raises other issues altogether, for which OpenOffice.org 
may offer our current best hope of a decent solution. Me, I'm sticking with 
XEmacs.

Best Regards,
Thomas.

[1] 
http://supportweb.cs.bham.ac.uk/documentation/tutorials/docsystem/build/tutorials/docbooksys/docbooksyshome.html
[2] http://www.dpawson.co.uk/docbook/
[3] http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/docbook_howto.asp

---
"I know _nothing_!" -- Manuel.