Re: (sgml vs XML)+indexing

[John Sheehan <John Sheehan ireland sun com>]

Dave Mason wrote:

> What 'inline' tags are you referring to that cause problems? The GDP
> uses nothing outside of DocBook. The only problem you would have is
> that you would not have 'well marked up' docs which takes a small
> amount of human-eye-time to solve. If you do not invest the time we
> still have a large amount of documents that will work just fine in
> terms of display, but still need some extra content markup... unless
> there are structural elements you are not using.
> 
Yes there are structural differences. For example, SolBook does not 
support articles.  We want to be able to easily flip between DocBook and 
SolBook by means of filters/scripts rather than by modifying by hand.  
Three examples of why this is useful for us:

  1. There may exist a DocBook help manual which we need to localise.
     Our localisation tools use the SolBook DTD, and they strip out 
     the text into translation memory.  So we would hope to flip the 
     manual from DocBook to SolBook, localise it, and flip it back to
     Docbook.  This is easier than extending all our tools to support 
     the full DocBook DTD.
  
  2. We will produce a Gnome to CDE Migration guide, which will describe
     how CDE users can migrate their CDE preferences and tools to Gnome
     (we are developing scripts and recommendations to help users do this).
     As the guide would be in print, we would produce it in SolBook as 
     that is what our backend printing processes support.  We would make
     this available in DocBook to the GDP, since others may have a similar 
     CDE migration requirement.
     
  3. We believe our users will need a user guide that has elements that
     are Solaris specific i.e specific to the set of Gnome apps we release
     and the underlying hardware and OS.  We would produce this is in
     SolBook.  Where we want to make extracts of this guide available as
     online help in Gnome, we would flip them to DocBook.
      
> By the way, you do realize that Mr. DocBook (Norman Walsh) is now an
> employee of Sun working on... DocBook? Perhaps it would be good to get
> opinions from him on some of these issues.
> 

I believe (hope) our doc tools group are doing this.

Thanks

John