Re: Why not create packages?

[Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@canada.com>]

>>>>> "M" == Martin WHEELER <mwheeler@startext.co.uk> writes:

    M> Now there's an idea I like!  Anyone got any ideas on how to
    M> string together such a Pizza Chef?

Yes.

can I stop now? hmmm ... thought you'd say that :(

I am exploring this (read "musing and pondering") for a number of
documentation projects, and it seems more people are getting the idea
every day.  At Comdex I talked with the Pearson's director of
international operations about this, I've had numerous email
discussions with the Nupedia project along these lines, and just
yesterday I was on the phone for two hours with a project lead from a
group wanting to produce humanities textbooks (in TEI DTD) and this
publishing process also seems to them to be inevitable.

It's one of those computing problems that just presses all my keywords ;)

Here's my executive summary: Basically, it starts with abandoning the
idea of the file-system as the basic unit of info-chunk organization.
The DTD must be the basic unit of data definition and is used to prep
a relational database. Next, the XML must be dissected and stored in
as relational data down to the element level and tagged by all element
attributes.  From there, you need only (only!)  express the book
request by a suitable query string.

That first step, DTD->schema and SGML/XML -> RDBMS, is being worked
on by a number of companies, but none in the pure-opensource community
that I know of (many with plans, none with actual product).  When these
do materialize, we will have the best impetus to move away from
DocBook/SGML to DocBook/XML.

If anyone wants to fund such a component, I am all ears, and once I get
the kernelbook off to the press, my schedule for the next 10 years is
wide open ;)

-- 
Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@linux.ca>: office voice/fax: 01 519 4222723
TCI - Business Innovations through Open Source : http://www.teledyn.com
737520 facts about the Linux kernel : http://kernelbook.sourceforge.net



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