[ZDP] Re: Structured Text in Vars/DTML Methods

[John Eikenberry]

On Sun, 7 Mar 1999, Shaw, Howard wrote:

> SGML is not like a different version of HTML. It is a whole 'nother
> level of abstraction, such that HTML is an 'instance' of SGML. What you
> really should be looking at is not SGML per se, but rather SGML as
> combined with the DocBook SGML DTD, which defines an 'instance' of SGML
> in the same manner that the W3C HTML DTD defines HTML as an 'instance'
> of SGML. 

Yes. I meant DocBook, I figured it was assumed.
 
> The Docbook SGML DTD is valuable for consideration, not because of any
> particular inherent benefits, but because it jives with the Linux
> SGMLTools and is designed for the specific purpose of producing
> documentation. It defines a high level abstract form of documentation,
> from which SGMLTools generates a document in one of several formats,
> such as info, LaTeX, HMTL, etc.

Exactly. 

> So, if (and here I am on shaky ground, as I know absolutely nothing
> about this StructuredText you have been speaking of) you can hack the
> StructuredText parser to produce a document that conforms to the Docbook
> DTD (DTD stands for Document Type Definition, and is a part of SGML and
> XML, and defines an 'instance' of one or the other), then the Linux
> tools can bring HTML, et al out of it. Assuming your StructuredText
> provides the internal mechanisms for specifying the intent of portions
> of the text, and internal and external cross-references, it might be
> sufficiently powerful to generate the required result.

My idea is that it sounds like it might not be too hard to adapt the
current StructuredText code to spit out DocBook SGML instead of HTML. It
wouldn't send this to the browser, it would just save it to a file (for
downloading). The goal is more just to have a way to get the whole of the
document (FAQ in this case) into SQML. My personal interest is using
allowing me to use the FAQ tool for my HOWTO, while still being able to
spit out an SGML version for the LDP.

---

John Eikenberry
[jae@kavi.com - http://taos.kavi.com/~jae/] 
______________________________________________________________
"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order
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