Re: DAVENPORT: Linux Documentation Project New Direction

[eichin@thok.org (Mark W. Eichin)]

You might send along a pointer to "Structuring XML Documents", David
Megginson, ISBN 0-13-642299-3, 1998.  In it, he presents a number of
document oriented (as opposed to application oriented, like MoDL,
CPML, or FinXML, to pick some examples from Robin Cover's pages[1])
DTD design principles, and then evaluates five reference DTD's in
terms of these principles.  In particular, he compares ISO 12083,
DocBook, TEI, MIL-STD-38784 (CALS), and HTML 4.0.  Megginson is clear,
precise, and convincing in his analysis - and the one conclusion you
can't avoid drawing is that you would be hard pressed to *avoid* good
document design techniques more thoroughly than HTML has.  The
principles espoused are well grounded, and Megginson doesn't actually
slam HTML at all - just goes through point by point, leading the
reader to the inevitable conclusion.

Anyone interested in documentation markup simply must read this book,
or at least chapters 2-5 (not that you'd stop, the rest of the book is
useful, just deeper.)  One might not stick with DocBook -- but after
looking at this perspective on DTD design, HTML wouldn't even be on
the list of reasonable choices.

			_Mark_ <eichin@thok.org>
			The Herd Of Kittens

[1] http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/sgmlnew.html