Re: DOCBOOK: Date in PCDATA?

[Norman Walsh <ndw at nwalsh dot com>]

/ Laurie Mann <laurie.mann@ansys.com> was heard to say:
| >From: Jorge Godoy [mailto:godoy@conectiva.com]
| >> "Norman" == Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> writes:
| 
| >>    Norman> I added an RFE for it.
| 
| >It would be intersting to have an RFE for a <today /> too. 
| 
| >It could be used like the \today in LaTeX to print the date >a document
| >was converted to any other format. It coulde be even made in >a group of
| tags:
| 
| I think this is a great idea.  Please make it so!  ;->

Anyone can contribute to the RFE database, http://www.docbook.org/rfe/

I personally think <today/> is a really bad idea. The day on which a
document is printed is irrelevant. What's important is *when was it
last modified*. For this, I think entities serve just fine:

<!DOCTYPE ... [
<!ENTITY last-modified-year "2000">
<!ENTITY last-modified-month "Aug">
<!ENTITY last-modified-day "07">
<!-- or even, let CVS/RCS handle it -->
<!ENTITY last-modified "$Id$">
]>

I'll further point out that some formatting systems don't even provide
*access* to the current date, so it would not be possible, in the
general case, to support <today/>.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | just is. And we dance to its
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | music.--Richard Dawkins