Re: your mail

[Nik Clayton <nik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On Tue, Jun 08, 1999 at 06:10:26PM -0700, Allan Bowhill wrote:
> Despite the exceptions, I get the impression that SGML is (and will
> continue to be) the primary documentation platform on FreeBSD
> and Linux systems, while XML will be integrated into MS Windows
> applications.

I can second that, at least for the time being.  I'm the FreeBSD
Doc. Proj. Manager (nik@xxxxxxxxxxx) and we've got quite a lot invested
in DocBook now, to the extant that we've customised the DTD a bit, and
have been working with Norm's DSSSL stylesheets for the past year or
so.

>From our point of view, the killer missing feature from our current
toolbox is a way to go from DocBook to *roff.  A colleague, Chuck 
Robey, is currently working on this using XML and XSLT, but I haven't
delved too deeply in to those.  This is partly so that we can get
Postscript output without needing TeX installed[1], and partly to see
how feasible it might be to move to DocBook as a manual page format
at some point.

I've only just subscribed to this list -- I'd heard some disturbing 
rumours that folks such as James Clark were saying "DSSSL is dead,
XSL is the future" and wanted to find out for myself what the situation
was.

N

[1] Not that it's particularly difficult.  But TeX is big and slow, 
    which helps dissuade people from contributing when they see what's
    necessary to build PS and PDF versions of their documentation.
-- 
 [intentional self-reference] can be easily accommodated using a blessed,
 non-self-referential dummy head-node whose own object destructor severs
 the links.
    -- Tom Christiansen in <375143b5@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>


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