RFC: Upgrading to DocBook 5.0

[Warren Block]

On Sun, 14 Jul 2013, Gabor Kovesdan wrote:

> Em 14-07-2013 14:52, Warren Block escreveu:
>> On Sun, 14 Jul 2013, Gábor Kövesdán wrote:
>> 
>>> Some more things:
>>> 
>>> - Admonitions (top, note, warning boxes) look quite strange in lists and 
>>> such places. I think we should add a policy to avoid them and start 
>>> changing the markup.
>> 
>> Admonitions are overused in some places.  They are visually jarring, often 
>> moreso than the tip or warning deserves.  A link to an example of this 
>> particular problem would be helpful to see what you mean, though.
> For example here: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/history.html
>
> It breaks the list. It is even worse in PDF rendering since there are page 
> boundaries and it breaks the page up to two parts.

I see what you mean.  But if we say "don't use admonitions in lists 
because they are visually ugly, that becomes markup for appearance and 
not for semantics.

Some tweaking of the CSS may help, like reducing the size of the 
admonition title so it is not so much larger than the surrounding text. 
docbook.css is something I've been meaning to look at, hopefully soon.

>>> - We extensively use markup in titles, which later renders with a 
>>> different font. E.g. we mark the X of 9.X as replaceable or we mark up 
>>> root as a username. I think that such rendering should be avoided in 
>>> titles and the easiest and cleanest way to do so would be not using such 
>>> markup in titles.
>> 
>> Please expand--what is the problem with differing fonts in titles?  I can 
>> see this both ways, but the text of a title being consistent with the 
>> rendering in the body seems like an advantage.
> Apart from the ugly visual outlook, it is not conventional in books and as 
> such, it is just bothering and confusing for the reader. It breaks the 
> information flow. Typographyc conventions serve for nice visual outlook and 
> usability. The typesetting should facilitate reading and not difficulting it. 
> If we want to publish a high-quality print edition of Handbook, we must 
> follow the conventions, otherwise it won't be a serious publication.

Again, doesn't this break the semantics versus appearance separation? 
If the standard is to show titles in a single font and size, then that 
should be done when rendering.  Semantically, a filename is a filename 
whether it is in a title or body text.

I find different fonts for filenames and commands to be useful, even in 
titles.  The O'Reilly style guide doesn't mention anything about title 
styles, and in a quick search I did not find anything else.

>>> - Currently, we use the CALS table model in the documentation, while 
>>> DocBook also supports the HTML table model. It has a more simple syntax 
>>> and more rendering features in the DocBook stylesheets. Another advantage 
>>> is that by using it, we would have only one table semantics in docs + web. 
>>> Any objection to changing to the HTML table model?
>> 
>> An example would be useful here, also.  For compatibility with the rest of 
>> the world, we should probably stick with the most common usage.
> Most common is very relative. HTML uses exclusively the HTML table model, 
> hence the name. CALS is older and quite common in the SGML/XML world. Both 
> are supported in DocBook and we currently use CALS. Earlier there was no 
> other option in DocBook. Using exclusively HTML tables would reduce the used 
> table models to one.
>
> Examples: just google for CALS table and HTML table, both are documented 
> extensively.

For reference, here are links:

http://www.docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/cals.table.html
http://www.docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/html.table.html

Changing the source documents could be scripted, but would also require 
modifications to the FDP Primer.

I can't tell if HTML tables have all the same capabilities as CALS 
tables.

>>> - Some lists have their own title, while the preceding text usually 
>>> introduces well what is enumerated in the list. I find the rendered title 
>>> quite strange between this text and the list. Besides, I don't remember 
>>> having seen technical books that use such titles. My suggestion is to 
>>> simple remove them. Any objection or better idea?
>> 
>> Please give an example here, also.
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/bsdinstall-pre.html
>
> Look at 2.3.3.  There's a semicolon at the end of the last paragraph and list 
> title is just floating there in the middle. This type of titles breaks the 
> flow of the text and doesn't facilitate reading.

The previous toolchain rendered that title in bold:
http://docs.freebsd.org/doc/9.0-RELEASE/usr/share/doc/freebsd/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/bsdinstall-pre.html

Agreed, that title does not look very good.  Adding a colon to list 
titles when rendering would help.  Removing all list titles be too 
severe.

>> All of these suggestions seem to be style changes that are not necessarily 
>> tied to the change to DocBook 5, or maybe changes that are not possible 
>> until after the conversion.  Unless they're required, it may be best to 
>> wait until after the conversion.
> Not in theory but theory doesn't always match practice. I'm working on the 
> DocBook 5 change to provide better rendering and support publishing print 
> versions. I'm evaluating and customizing two different rendering methods and 
> I have to see where we can get with each. Practically I can do it by 
> eliminating the confusing and bothering factors. This is sometimes done by 
> customizing the rendering and sometimes by feeding back the results to the 
> concrete documents.

Understood.  Thank you for working on this!