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

   / Paul Grosso <pgrosso@arbortext.com> was heard to say:
   | What is the feasibility of writing an XSLT transform to map
   | existing xmlspec documents into our DocBook-like replacement?

   That should be quite practical.

					   Be seeing you,
					     norm

There's two possible uses of such a transform.
Either we switch all the sources to docbook as a one-off effort, and
make xmlspec3 an (extension of a subset of)  docbook dtd.
Then we have to update all the current xmlspec tools (which might be
harder)

or we specify (and implement in xslt) a translation of xmlspec to
docbook, but still recommend that documents are authored in an xmlspec
markup. That way we can still use specific xmlspec tools, the simpler
table model etc, but if we want to make use of any of the docbook suite
of tools all that needs to be done is use the cannonical translation to
docbook first.

I think I favour the second approach as I think it is easier to get
people using xml if the element names are closely tied to the semantics
document at hand.

However whether the XML is xmlspec or docbook based, it looks like a
good idea to allow some rdf metadata block at the beginning. Dan C's job
of extracting the metadata would be a lot easier if it was already explicit
in the XML source.

David

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Received on Thursday, 18 October 2001 05:11:48 UTC