Re: (sgml vs XML)+indexing

[Ali Abdin <ALIABDIN aucegypt edu>]

On Thu, 26 Oct 2000, Laszlo Kovacs wrote:

> > So Solbook is based on DocBook SGML? Then why is Laszlo advocating for us to
> > switch to DocBook XML instead of our current DocBook SGML?
> Everything I know about this is in the first mail from this thread. Have
> you read that?

Yes - but I was hoping Jacek would jump into the conversation ;) (and 
possibly explain your suggestion).
 
> > I can understand this, but I do not think that it is really appropriate
> > for us to use Solbook.
> > 
> > DocBook has been agreed upon by many Linux projects (Linux Documentation
> > Project, KDE, GNOME, (its being used for kernel API documentation). It
> > wouldn't be in GNOME's best interest to say "We shall switch to SolBook now",
> > even though we made a commitment to DocBook.
> I dont understand how this came up. I never said we should use SolBook,
> I never even mentioned SolBook in my thread starting email. 

Umm, weren't you recommended we look into SolBook so we could utilize the 
indexing tools that Sun has?

Maybe I misunderstood (or need to re-read your initial mail).

> > 1) What is the difference between DocBook and SolBook (we can try to
> > accomodate SolBook)? Can you make some sample SolBook files available (John
> > Fleck has been doing extensive documentation testing for me, and from this
> > testing i add stuff to gnome-db2html2)
> I dont know, I am not a doc writer. There are people on this list from
> Sun (and maybe others) who could answer this to you.

Hopefully they will speak up ;) 

> [snip]
> > By the way - isn't the ScrollKeeper project supposed to /solve/ the indexing
> > problem (by indexing documentation Metadata)?
> No:-) It never wanted to index documentation metadata. It wanted to
> index the sgml docs. So if those docs would be in XML then we would get
> an OpenSource JAVA based search engine that would index the Gnome docs.
> This is what this thread is about as far as I am concerned.

Ahh yes - indexing documents (not metadata). Well, if we want Nautilus 
recommendation I would recommend we create a help indexer specifically 
for the help documents (shouldn't be that difficult - but somebody just 
needs to do the work).

By the way, I think 'Open Source' is not enough for GNOME (i.e. we need 
Free Software since we are a GNU project (maybe they are same to you, but 
others will make that distinction)). By the way, what license is that 
Java based search engine?

Also - the fact that it uses Java is a problem because Java support is 
still not "mature" in Linux yet (should get better with gcc 3.0)

Regards,
Ali