[Mono-list] GNOME.NET Tutorial

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> About why use Docbook: it's not really for the output, is for
> structuring the content. The semantic markup is content in the same way
> text is. XHTML could do the same? If you use poor docbook markup the
> answer is yes, but at the first moment you use more high semantic
> meaning marks the answer is definitively no.

I am sure that you can do great things by using the right structure, but
DocBook documents are a pain to produce, edit and maintain.  

To make things worse, even if you get the right layout, I have never
seen a Docbook output that looks remotely decent.  So given the choice
of pain, structure and butt-ugly vs easy, somewhat-structured and easily
pretificable, the choice is obvious.

> About quality docbook output: I don't find it particularly horrible. I
> agree there is very important problems caused by the TeX back-end for
> the PDF/PS output. But this backend is being rewritten these days in the
> XSL side[1]. The HTML output is very beautiful instead. Another very
> important point is the docbook stylesheets are internationalized into
> lots of languages. This mean the presentation will respect the national
> language ortho-typographical rules.

My suggestion is to use plain HTML, and in the future, and when the
documents are finished, and you have not spent days fighting docbook,
you can have a volunteer with lots of time to do the conversion.  Big
deal.


Miguel