On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 04:50:53PM +0100, Robert Bihlmeyer wrote:
Larry Sanger <lsanger(a)nupedia.com> writes:
This, by the way, would be a great feature for
Wikipedia to be able to
use; we'd certainly like Wikipedia articles to be convertable to DocBook
XML format. That's what we decided we wanted to use as an XML DTD for
Nupedia, and surely we'd want to use it for Wikipedia too.
I'm not convinced that DocBook is the best DTD for this kind of
content. I like it very much for (computer-oriented) technical
documentation, but for a more general topic? When used to its full
extent DB is also quite baroque, and most of it probably wouldn't be
used (for example the GUISUBMENU element <g>). Take a look at
<URL:http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/part2.html> to get an overview
of DocBook elements.
A simpler, encylopedia-specific DTD may be better. On the other hand,
I don't know of any off-the-shelf DTD that fits this description, and
a DocBook-subset may be better supported by other software than any
DTD that's just used by Nupedia (and maybe Wikipedia).
I agree that any complete-ish implementation of DocBook would be very
hard and frought with difficulty. However, being about to export into
basic docbook (meaning not much more than links, sections, and <para>
tags) would allow the content to be worked into DocBook based
publication systems and such, and also the generation of pdf,
postscript, and other outputs. And *that* much at least would be
fairly easy and worth doing imho.
--
David C. Merrill
http://www.lupercalia.net
Linux Documentation Project david(a)lupercalia.net
Collection Editor & Coordinator
http://www.linuxdoc.org
And let's face facts. innovation has never been Microsoft's strong suite.
We're much better at ripping off our competitors. For example, we did not
invent either ASP or IE, we bought them!
--E-mail from an unidentified Microsoft employee,
as revealed in the antitrust trial