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

/ Philippe Le Hegaret <plh@w3.org> was heard to say:
| Norman Walsh wrote:
| > - XMLSpec tag names are often HTML-derived so they tend to be shorter.
| >   (e.g. <p> vs. <para>, <att> vs. <sgmltag class='attribute'>.)
| 
| I would say that's the job of the editor so we should not let us stopped
| by this issue.

Fair enough.

| > - XMLSpec has more "special purpose" elements (e.g., <specref/>,
| >   <bibref/>, etc.  where DocBook has just <xref/>).
| 
| I would suggest to keep the XMLspec format here (and in general to always
| prefer the "special purpose" elements over a general element). I don't know
| about the XSL but the DOM generator is doing different manipulation depending
| on the element (specref, xspecref or bibref).

I tend to favor the other approach myself, allowing the link behavior
to be determined by the thing it points to. But I don't feel very
strongly about it.

| > Q1: Are we willing to break legacy in significant ways? Could the
| >     XMLSpec doctype be made more DocBook-like and vice versa?
| 
| This will force the DOM working group to revise its DOM generator and the
| XSL for the DOM Test Suites but it is possible to do it. I'm waiting for
| more feedback before asking the group directly.

Yes, we definitely need more feedback. It's too early to start changing
things :-)

| > Q3: Can this be addressed organizationally? Could the W3C be persuaded
| >     to accept DocBook documents as specs? Could OASIS be persuaded to
| >     accept XMLSpec?
| 
| As Dan pointed out, the W3C has no constraint on tools used to
| produce as long as the resulting document HTML valid and conforms to
| the W3C style. I don't think that all working groups are ready to
| switch to XML yet unfortunately. We will need to ask/persuade the
| working groups who are currently using xmlspec to switch to the new
| format.

That will probably be easier than persuading the working groups not currently
using XML at all to start using it :-)

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM   | If you're strong enough, there *are* no
XML Standards Engineer | precedents.--Scott Fitzgerald
XML Technology Center  | 
Sun Microsystems, Inc. |

Received on Wednesday, 17 October 2001 13:36:41 UTC