Question about bug 8206

On 2006.10.05 14:24, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > Note that "reasonably good" doesn't mean
perfect, which (once again)
> > implies that presentation-driven markup won't
always map one-to-one to
> > logical markup.
> 
> Could you give some concrete example for why Texinfo is
"presentation
> oriented"?  I always think of it as logical
markup.

Footnote styles.

Practically everything in the "Forcing and Preventing
Breaks" node in Texinfo's info.  (See, however, http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/documen
tation/reference/html/sbr.html)

In Texinfo, how can you indicate that you're referring to
someone's name?  Or portions of their name?  Since there is
no particular reason to display a person's name in some
unusual fashion, there's really no reason for
presentation-driven markup to have special markup for names.

In Docbook 5.0, you'd look for a <personname> tag
followed by the <firstname>, <surname>, and
other tags.

Is that important?  Depends upon what you're doing.  For
*my* purposes at the moment, it isn't.  But I'm not that
great at predicting my future needs.  However, I do know
that I can translate logical markup to presentation markup
without error.  I don't think that I could go the other way
without a lot of work and the end result might not be
correct.

So I'd say that perhaps the best thing to do would be to
look at the markup available from Docbook.  If you could see
a use for being able to pick out or manipulate specific
portions of your documentation by using those tags, then you
should consider using Docbook.  If you don't think you ever
would use that ability, then you probably would not want to
spend the effort to add that additional information which
you would never use into your documentation.

(If you're an emacs user, nxml-mode with docbook-rnc is
quite nimble.  Much, much faster than psgml-mode.  See http://www.docbook
.org/docs/howto/ for links.)


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>> > Note that "reasonably good" doesn't
mean perfect, which (once again)
>> > implies that presentation-driven markup won't
always map one-to-one to
>> > logical markup.
>> 
>> Could you give some concrete example for why
Texinfo is "presentation
>> oriented"?  I always think of it as logical
markup.

> Footnote styles.

> Practically everything in the "Forcing and
Preventing Breaks" node in
> Texinfo's info.  (See, however,
> http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/documen
tation/reference/html/sbr.html)

Indeed, because Texinfo is on the simple side, it sometimes
needs help to
make the presentation a little better.  But as a user, it's
definitely not
something I normally use.

> In Texinfo, how can you indicate that you're referring
to someone's name?

You can't.  But all that says is that Texinfo's logical
markup
is incomplete.  Not that Texinfo's markup is
presentation-driven.

> Or portions of their name?  Since there is no
particular reason to display
> a person's name in some unusual fashion, there's really
no reason for
> presentation-driven markup to have special markup for
names.

Oh I think I see what you mean.  You really mean
presentation-*driven*
rather than presentation-*oriented*.  Then I guess you're
right: Texinfo was
designed as a *logical* markup but the design of that markup
was kept as
simple as possible, where the main source of complexity
comes from
presentation needs.


        Stefan


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