xml-dev - Re: eBook Publishing DTD -- Preconceptual musings

["Eve L. Maler" <elm@east.sun.com>]

At 04:17 PM 3/8/00 +0000, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>Jon Noring writes:
>  > Yes, the intent in my last post was NOT to discuss the fine intricacies of
>  > TEI or DocBook or whatever, but to point out that philosophically they are
>  > different in several basic ways.
>
>I am not sure you have proved that point, actually. To me, the
>philosophical difference between TEI and Docbook is that the latter
>provides a lot of detailed specialized tags for writing computer software
>documentation. what else is different, conceptually?

Jumping into the middle here--

TEI is mostly meant for marking up existing texts, and makes fewer 
validation demands because it may need to accommodate inconsistent 
content.  DocBook is mostly meant for authoring and publishing new text, 
and makes many demands on the coherence of the newly authored stuff (though 
we've been relaxing some of this over time).

TEI covers a lot of "verticals" within the humanities space (poetry, plays, 
etc.), which typically don't interact that much; DocBook is relatively 
unified (all of GUIs, command line interfaces, programming, manpages of all 
types, etc. in the model) because it's hard to separate these topics into 
different documents, though you can chop out bits you don't need.  This is 
why TEI has a pizza model and DocBook's "modules" are much more tightly 
integrated.

There are, of course, lots of smaller differences in the DTD design and 
implementation principles used by the two.

         Eve
--
Eve Maler            Sun Microsystems
elm @ east.sun.com    +1 781 442 3190

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