[Doc-SIG] XML Conversion Update

[Sean Mc Grath]

At 23:16 29/08/99 +0200, you wrote:
>While I agree with Sean (and others) that small DTDs are a lot better
>suited to documenting Python modules there's various
>standard-formatting things that you'd like to borrow from existing
>DTDs (emphasis, references to other manuals/sections, footnotes, etc).
>
>Is there a way that that could be done, without dragging in the whole
>of the (apparently huge and hairy, from the reports here) docbook DTD?

I think we should grab some of the formatting things from the HTML 
tag soup - including a really simple table model.

A key question I believe is the naming convention issue. This is key
to document management and key to cross references.

I believe we should strive for a semantic naming scheme for
information objects. I propose a naming scheme based
on what I dub "fully qualified information object identifiers".
The idea is to use the hierarchical location of an information
object in a document assembly to arrive at a meaninful and unique
names e.g.:

	Library_Reference-Python_Services-UserList.xml
	API-Abstract_Objects_Layer-Mapping_Protocol.xml

As well as acting as names for information object storage
these are also names for xref purposes e.g.:

	See <xref idref="API-Abstract_Objects_Layer-Mapping_Protocol">
	the mapping protocol</xref> for more information.


I suggest we go with XML rather than SGML in the sense
that anything checked in/out of the system is XML.
People who know SGML will probably want to pepper
in some tag minimization for their emacs setup:-)
They can then use James Clarks SX for example
to convert to XML.

regards,

<Sean URI="http://www.digitome.com/sean.html">
Developers Day Co-Chair, 9th International World Wide Web Conference
16-19, May, 2000, Amsterdam, The Netherlands http://www9.org
</Sean>