• From: Matej Cepl <mcepl@r...>
• To: xml-dev@l...
• Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2007 00:15:56 +0200

On 2007-09-10, 14:15 GMT, Jonathan Robie wrote:
> For Word Processing documents, what was wrong with Docbook?

That it is heavily targeted towards computer-related texts. I am 
just in the process of transcribing Haggadah (if you don't know 
what exactly it looks like, think about something like theatre 
drama with a liturgical twist). As a newbie in Docbook (and just 
coming from wonderful presentation of Norm Walsh on XMLPrague), 
I have thought about Docbook first. After just first page, I had 
to give up -- there is just not a good way how to transcribe 
Haggadah in Docbook, unless you either

- dumb down your transcription to HTML-level, or
- you make some really awfull internal misuse of tags (something 
  on the level of "<classname> actually means what I would like
  to write as <speach>"), which defeats the purpose of XML in the
  first place, or
- you effectively develop some special schema as Docbook 
  extension, which defeats the idea of standardized schema.

I switched to much more complicated TEI and I am pretty happy 
with it, but I begun to have doubts about that book on the 
Islamic Architecture written in Docbook 
(http://norman.walsh.name/2003/10/09/dei). How much Docbook was 
in its Docbook?

Best,

Matěj Cepl

• References:
  • Re: The year is 2027, and we need to examine archived XML documents from 2007 ...
    • From: Michael Champion <mc@x...>
  • Re: The year is 2027, and we need to examine archived XMLdocuments from 2007 ...
    • From: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@r...>