[DOC-SIG] Comparing SGML DTDs

[Paul Prescod]

> I'd say the most important issue here is whether it's hard to write
> or not.  I don't think so, but I haven't digged into any serious DTD
> yet...

Don't try to pin that 'serious DTD' rap on SGML. :) If TIM is as structured
as anyone wants, then SGML can be as unstructured as TIM. It can also be
as tag minimized as TIM.

> Has anyone looked at RTF<->SGML conversion?  Guess that could
> allow people to use Frame or Word  (FWIW, I'm writing my book
> in Word, with an RTF template created by Frame, and the resulting
> files are converted to SGML by the ORA wizards... don't ask me
> how they do it, though).

You can convert RTF to SGML if you have no interest in taking advantage 
of SGML's greatest feature. :) I've been trying to make this point but have 
obviously not been having much success. SGML's greatest feature (which,
admittedly it shares with TIM) is that it allows you to develop new 
abstractions and tag them. RTF (and Word) is an abstraction killer. Its most 
sophisticated abstraction is the "paragraph". If we are going to start
from RTF then there is very little value in using SGML at any stage in the
process.

SGML's second greatest feature (which it does not share with TIM) is that it
is an International, and soon W3C standard with hundreds of tools and 
tens of thousands of users and sites. I guess it is vaguely possible that
one of those tools will be useful with our "RTF-Demented SGML" but it isn't
likely. SGML is designed to be a source format, not a converted-to format.

But if you don't want to type tags at all, there is Frame+SGML and even
(uck) "SGML Author for Word". You still have to think about *structure* but
you don't have to type tags. In my experience, however, changing styles from
one to the other is no easier than typing tags. You can bind your styles
to a hotkey, but you can do the same with tags in Emacs.

> Or is the Emacs SGML mode good enough?

I think so. My only concern is that I have found it slow with huge DTDs on
slow machines. At home (P100, 32MB) it is quite good. With reasonably sized
DTDs (e.g. DocBook subsets) it is also quite good.

 Paul Prescod


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