DocBook Dialogue
To be fair, I should clarify that that post, based on an IRC transcript, is misleading. I don't have a complaint about DocBook XML and interoperability with other XML formats per se. Instead, I have two complaints; one a broad criticism about XML interop as a whole, and the other a more detailed argument involving DocBook. I should further clarify that my criticism about DocBook isn't about the format itself -- I like DocBook a lot, and I want to use it, but I find it very hard to actually do so today, and most of this is due to a lack of good software.
I have a mildly more coherent, if more rambling (if such a thing is possible) rant about this. Briefly, there is and has been a lot of hype about how useful and easy it is to write documents in portable XM-based formats, DocBook being one example (and my chosen format), and I even knew some people who were doing it successfully, but it was nowhere near anything I considered easy, and certainly not as easy as the hype said it was. The post describes my particular scenario, which I'm sure doesn't hold for everyone, and keep in mind it *is* very much a rant, written with more than a smidgen of irritation at the time, but I would be thrilled for your comments on it and the issue at large.
For whatever it's worth, my interim solution has been to go back writing everything for work in ASCII plaintext first, and worrying about either document portability, be it semantic (as one might do with DocBook) or layout (Word, TeX) later. I've thought about doing DocBook again, this time eschewing XML-aware editors like XMetaL and the like, and just using a text editor, but still find the mess around XSLT and XSL-FO to be too daunting for too little return.
I asked Norm if I could blog our discussion, and he agreed, and posted his reply on his blog.
More to come soon. I'm catching up with everything that I missed during CodeCon, which was great.
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