Re: spec-prod, xmlspec, docbook and Co.

> We will need to ask/persuade the working groups who are currently using
> xmlspec to switch to the new format.

As I mentioned earlier I was anyway planning to try to migrate the
MathML spec sources from a hacked-xmlspec-1 to a less-hacked-xmlspec-2
so waiting a bit and then instead migrating to an xmlspec-3/docbook
wouldn't be a problem for us.

I could also (probably, depending on other constraints at the time)
help out in any effort to write XSLT conversions.

Of course, writing the document conversion is the easy bit: just some
xslt (or emacs lisp, according to taste:-) it's converting the tools
that is a harder job.

The mathmlspec.xsl XSLT began life as an early version of xmspec.xsl but
diverged wildly from that, and there are also tools to generate tex (for
the pdf versions of the spec), to extract the sources of all the images
from the XML and generate those images, etc. Currently I can ssh to
the w3c's machine, run one script and everything checks itself out of
cvs, and generates all the spec, the dtd, pdf, zip files etc and makes
an entire public distribution that just needs moving into the TR area (or
leaving where it is in our group area if it's an internal draft)
Getting all that working again would be the hard part of any change, not
changing the documents. There seems to be little  uniformity in the
tools used between different specifications, even amongst those of us
that are using xmlspec markup.

David

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Received on Wednesday, 17 October 2001 13:08:15 UTC