On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 04:50:53PM +0100, Robert Bihlmeyer wrote:
Larry Sanger lsanger@nupedia.com writes:
This, by the way, would be a great feature for Wikipedia to be able to use; we'd certainly like Wikipedia articles to be convertable to DocBook XML format. That's what we decided we wanted to use as an XML DTD for Nupedia, and surely we'd want to use it for Wikipedia too.
I'm not convinced that DocBook is the best DTD for this kind of content. I like it very much for (computer-oriented) technical documentation, but for a more general topic? When used to its full extent DB is also quite baroque, and most of it probably wouldn't be used (for example the GUISUBMENU element <g>). Take a look at URL:http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/part2.html to get an overview of DocBook elements.
A simpler, encylopedia-specific DTD may be better. On the other hand, I don't know of any off-the-shelf DTD that fits this description, and a DocBook-subset may be better supported by other software than any DTD that's just used by Nupedia (and maybe Wikipedia).
I agree that any complete-ish implementation of DocBook would be very hard and frought with difficulty. However, being about to export into basic docbook (meaning not much more than links, sections, and <para> tags) would allow the content to be worked into DocBook based publication systems and such, and also the generation of pdf, postscript, and other outputs. And *that* much at least would be fairly easy and worth doing imho.