Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Question about bug 8206

[Mark Flacy]

On 2006.10.05 14:24, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > Note that "reasonably good" doesn't mean perfect, which (once again)
> > implies that presentation-driven markup won't always map one-to-one to
> > logical markup.
> 
> Could you give some concrete example for why Texinfo is "presentation
> oriented"?  I always think of it as logical markup.

Footnote styles.

Practically everything in the "Forcing and Preventing Breaks" node in Texinfo's 
info.  (See, however, 
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/documentation/reference/html/sbr.html)

In Texinfo, how can you indicate that you're referring to someone's name?  Or 
portions of their name?  Since there is no particular reason to display a 
person's name in some unusual fashion, there's really no reason for 
presentation-driven markup to have special markup for names.

In Docbook 5.0, you'd look for a <personname> tag followed by the <firstname>, 
<surname>, and other tags.

Is that important?  Depends upon what you're doing.  For *my* purposes at the 
moment, it isn't.  But I'm not that great at predicting my future needs.  
However, I do know that I can translate logical markup to presentation markup 
without error.  I don't think that I could go the other way without a lot of 
work and the end result might not be correct.

So I'd say that perhaps the best thing to do would be to look at the markup 
available from Docbook.  If you could see a use for being able to pick out or 
manipulate specific portions of your documentation by using those tags, then 
you should consider using Docbook.  If you don't think you ever would use that 
ability, then you probably would not want to spend the effort to add that 
additional information which you would never use into your documentation.

(If you're an emacs user, nxml-mode with docbook-rnc is quite nimble.  Much, 
much faster than psgml-mode.  See http://www.docbook.org/docs/howto/ for links.)