Volker Wysk writes:
> On Fri, 17 Mar 2000, Philip Wadler wrote:
>
> > Volker suggests using SGML/DSSSL for documentation. If one were to
> > take this route, I think XML/XSLT would be a more sensible combination.
>
> Why do you think so? I see the following advantages of SGML/DSSSL over
> XML/XSL:
>
> - open source tools available
> - SGML is much better for ordinary text editors. XML markup is quite
> heavy, because no tag minimisation is supported.
> - DTDs such as TEI-Lite and DocBook are for SGML. However, a XML-DTD for
> DocBook is being developed.
- Open source tools for XML/XSL are also available, and more of them.
- SGML is more complex than XML, so it is actually easier to handle XML with
extant text editors. For example, many SGML editing tasks require that the
editor is aware of the DTD or SGML declaration, whereas XML provides enough
syntactic hints that you can do without them more often. (For example, tags
for elements with empty content are syntactically distinct in XML;
whitespace treatment is explicit in an XML instance; ...) Your point about
tag minimization is worth noting, though.
- As you say, there is an XML DocBook DTD and stylesheet package in
development.
On the other hand, SGML has been redefined to be a more-or-less strict
superset of XML now. So you can, for example, use DSSSL tools to format XML as
well.
> SGML can be converted to XML, using a tool like sgmlnorm, I think.
Not in general, because the containment relation goes the other direction.
--
Frank Atanassow, Dept. of Computer Science, Utrecht University
Padualaan 14, PO Box 80.089, 3508 TB Utrecht, Netherlands
Tel +31 (030) 253-1012, Fax +31 (030) 251-3791
