Re: [docbook] How to use classsynopsis and friends

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

On 2015-10-05 22:48, Stefan Seefeld wrote:
> there was a project as part of Boost (http://boost.org) to augment
> DocBook with a more complete vocabulary for API documentation, which
> ultimately became "BoostBook"
> (http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_59_0/doc/html/boostbook.html).
> This has been ported back to DocBook 5 as an "API" extension, but at
> this point is still only available in a branch. (I intend to merge it 
> to
> master soon.)

It's too late now, I'm sure, but as a user of DocBook for purposes other 
than software documentation (we use it for grammars), DocBook seems 
bloated with all these tags for software (the aforementioned 
<classsynopsis> being a perfect example).  In our customization, we 
remove all those tags, and add in the ones we need for literate 
programming and for linguistics, using a namespace prefix for our tags.

It always seemed to me like DocBook could have had a much simpler model, 
by putting the software- and hardware-specific tags into a separate 
namespace.  That would make it easier for other potential users to wade 
through the remaining elements and decide which of them they really 
need.  Obviously that couldn't have happened until DB5, and it's 
probably too late now.  I suppose the next best thing would be to 
compile a list of tags that are core DB (meaning about text in general), 
and/or a list of software- and hardware-specific tags, which would make 
it easier for potential users.

   Mike Maxwell
   University of Maryland