Re: XML and GNOME community

[Daniel Veillard w3 org]

> > I have been browsing through the gnome world and found very few
> > places where XML and related standards are mentioned. And now I
> > wonder is there any interest at all in XML in the gnome community ?
> 
> Well, the standard documentation format is DocBook, which is an SGML
> DTD, so you could say GNOME is going a step further :-)

  Well that one DTD ! Generic SGML support for GNOME seems quite a big
task. XML is lighter and writing generic support for XML on the other hand
seems a reasonable task (especially if one can reuse the components being
designed in Mozilla). Moreover one will certainly find quite more XML
document in offices desktop than SGML ones ...
  Your argument is biased, you're not one step further in this case but
a good mile behind :-) The probability of having Gnome documentation DTD
being the next interchange format use in the enterprises is, I'm afraid,
a bit low.

> Besides (ahem) I've always been an advocate of using the right tool for
> the right job. XML is a document presentation format (even though it's
> extensible). So, uhm, how/where exactly does it fit into GNOME?

  As a set of API to load/display/modify generic XML documents. This will
allow easy exchange of documents. Remember that if you want Gnome to
be used as an office desktop framework, you will need to give access
to documents (i.e. information).
  Now you can argue whether these will be encoded in XML or not, considering
that a lot of big player in this area are announcing XML support, well
I guess the bet is safe.

Daniel
  
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