[Mono-list] GNOME.NET Tutorial

[Dietmar Maurer]

On Fri, 2002-11-15 at 16:04, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> 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.  

Your view of things, I cant agree here.

> 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.

I have already seen some nice Docbook documents. The layout is not
perfect, but good enough.

> > 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.

HTML --> ugly output + missing features :-( Cant see any advantage with
html.

- Dietmar