Re: [Fwd: Word Processors]

[Timothy Ritchey <tritchey vne com>]

> There _is_ already a XML-Version of DocBook.
>

Awesome!, I need to keep up on these things - do you have a URL for
that?
 
> The MS way of using XML as file format may look like this: The files are
> saved in XML and rendered by the apps via style sheets. The style sheet
> engine will probably use Active-X or something similar.
...
> The bad thing in this is the non-open style sheet language,

I was thinking of CSS - which is a W3C standard I thought.

> The standard stylesheet mechamism for SGML
> now is DSSL and DSSL uses scheme as script language. That should fit
> much better in gnome. SGML/DSSL is a little bit rocket science, though...

I certainly agree about the rocket science part. However, if it were
possible to reuse DSSSL with XML instead of SGML (which would seem to be
reasonable) then maybe some of the more essoteric parts could be culled. 

Users could then plug-in/create their own DTDs and DSSSLs, with standard
ones like DocBook packaged with the WP. Perhaps the Word XML extentions
could even be specified by a pluggable DTD that would allow the
viewing/editing of the proprietary information. I know there are
translators that allow documents to be convereted between formats/dtds
so you could import/export between DocBook and Word format.

tim