"Simple" DocBook Subset

Date:     Mon,  5 Apr 1999 17:31:57 -0400
From:     Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>
To:       davenport@berkshire.net
Subject:  DAVENPORT: Announcing: (pre-release) "Simple" DocBook subset

Hello world,

Over the years, the notion of a "simple" DocBook subset has come up, uh, more than once ;-). Many people have observed that the number of elements in DocBook can be a little overwhelming to the new user.

I've come across the topic several times in the last few weeks, so over the weekend, I took a stab at a simple subset.

One motivation for this was to produce a DTD that is small enough to download with IE5 in a fairly painless fashion.

Here's some of what I was thinking:

Documents written in the subset must be 100% legal DocBook documents.
This is for small documents, articles and the like, so there's no need for books or sets, just 'articles'.
The markup should be a very minimal subset, if you need richly structured markup, use DocBook or DocBk XML. It was not designed to be "HTML-level markup in DocBook", but it comes out something like that.
The DTD should work in IE5 (it's XML not SGML).
There should be a CSS stylesheet for it (mine's pretty lame)
There should be an XSL stylesheet for it (after the next draft ;-)

I haven't written the documentation for it yet, but I did put the DTDParse documentation online, so you can get a pretty good feel for what's there (http://nwalsh.com/docbook/simple/sdocbook/)

If you're interested, please take a look and let me know what you think.

                                        Cheers,
                                          norm

P.S. I don't recommend publishing "real" documents with it just yet, I won't promise backwards compatibility or version stability until I've had a chance to write the docs and received some feedback.

Norman Walsh ndw@nwalsh.com        | So, take not this aspirin and not
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | this aspirin, or not this aspirin
Member, DocBook Editorial Board    | or this aspirin, and call me in
                                   | DeMorgan.--Craig Swanson

Prepared by Robin Cover for the The SGML/XML Web Page archive.

SEARCH Advanced Search ABOUT Site Map CP RSS Channel Contact Us Sponsoring CP About Our Sponsors NEWS Cover Stories Articles & Papers Press Releases CORE STANDARDS XML SGML Schemas XSL/XSLT/XPath XLink XML Query CSS SVG TECHNOLOGY REPORTS XML Applications General Apps Government Apps Academic Apps EVENTS LIBRARY Introductions FAQs Bibliography Technology and Society Semantics Tech Topics Software Related Standards Historic	"Simple" DocBook Subset Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 17:31:57 -0400 From: Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> To: davenport@berkshire.net Subject: DAVENPORT: Announcing: (pre-release) "Simple" DocBook subset Hello world, Over the years, the notion of a "simple" DocBook subset has come up, uh, more than once ;-). Many people have observed that the number of elements in DocBook can be a little overwhelming to the new user. I've come across the topic several times in the last few weeks, so over the weekend, I took a stab at a simple subset. One motivation for this was to produce a DTD that is small enough to download with IE5 in a fairly painless fashion. Here's some of what I was thinking: Documents written in the subset must be 100% legal DocBook documents. This is for small documents, articles and the like, so there's no need for books or sets, just 'articles'. The markup should be a very minimal subset, if you need richly structured markup, use DocBook or DocBk XML. It was not designed to be "HTML-level markup in DocBook", but it comes out something like that. The DTD should work in IE5 (it's XML not SGML). There should be a CSS stylesheet for it (mine's pretty lame) There should be an XSL stylesheet for it (after the next draft ;-) I haven't written the documentation for it yet, but I did put the DTDParse documentation online, so you can get a pretty good feel for what's there (http://nwalsh.com/docbook/simple/sdocbook/) If you're interested, please take a look and let me know what you think. Cheers, norm P.S. I don't recommend publishing "real" documents with it just yet, I won't promise backwards compatibility or version stability until I've had a chance to write the docs and received some feedback. Norman Walsh ndw@nwalsh.com \| So, take not this aspirin and not http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ \| this aspirin, or not this aspirin Member, DocBook Editorial Board \| or this aspirin, and call me in \| DeMorgan.--Craig Swanson Prepared by Robin Cover for the The SGML/XML Web Page archive.