RFR: A Pack of Patches for Chapter "SGML Markup" in FDP Primer

[Gábor Kövesdán]

Rene Ladan escribió:
> 2008/11/29 Gabor PALI <pgj at freebsd.org>:
>   
>> Gábor Kövesdán wrote:
>>     
>>> Wow! The new pgj patchbombs are arriving. :)
>>>
>>>       
>> Sorry, I think I missed to upload and link the largest one:
>>
>> http://people.freebsd.org/~pgj/patches/2008/11/29/doc.en.books.fdp-primer.sgml-markup.patch/0.diff
>>
>> In this patch, I suggest a capitalization according to the "headline
>> style" of Chicago Manual of Style (15th Edition), paragraph 8.167.
>>
>>
>>     
> The patches look fine to me.  Maybe you can replace some instances of
> "FreeBSD" with "&os;" while you're at it.
>
> I'm slightly amazed that the book built with incorrect </font> tags
> (see patch 11).
> But the documentation seems to build with missing end tags in general.  Is there
> a way to check this automatically?
>   
In fact, missing end tags are not always incorrect. :) This is a feature 
of SGML, which is not true any more in XML. Among the other ones it is 
one reason why XML is considered cleaner and more practical. SGML also 
contains some additonal markup minimalization techniques because in the 
glorious days of SGML, when the capacity of the media was an important 
bottleneck, it was considered to be an advantage.
Some weird SGML examples:
<para>This is a paragraph with a <filename>filename</>.</>

<para/This is another paragraph with another <filename/filename/./

Now these features are not commonly used because of an obvious reason: 
they are very hard to read. On the other hand, an SGML parser is an 
extremely complex application, because it must deal with these 
constructions. Because of the complexity it can be slow and error prone. 
An XML parser is much less complex and XML has strict and clear rules 
that the documents must comform with.

I'm working on some steps towards an XML-based documentation project but 
my time is limited so the progress is slow.

-- 
Gabor Kovesdan

EMAIL: gabor at FreeBSD.org
WWW:   http://www.kovesdan.org