Re: [docbook-apps] Linux Weekly News: A quick look at Conglomerate 0.70

[Carl Anderson <cea at ncipher dot com>]

At 17:30 15/09/2003, Dave Pawson wrote:
> At 20:21 14/09/2003 +0200, Steinar Bang wrote:
> The Achilles heel of DocBook when "selling" it as a MSWord
> replacement,
>
> What a horrible thought.
> I hope docbook is never as bad as word.

I don't understand how could Docbook "replace" MSWord when (as I understand 
it) they are very different things: Docbook is a system for writing 
structured XML documents (or SGML, I suppose) and Word is a word-processing 
application.  Word is used to edit compatible files that contain text 
and/or images (independent of structure), but Docbook describes how your 
document is going to behave structurally, independent of what apps you use 
to edit files adhering to that structure.

And I have some difficulty imagining my grandmother sitting down to write a 
short letter using Docbook XML (actually, I wouldn't do that either -- 
MSWord, for all it's shortcomings, is perfectly sufficient for that task at 
present :)

Cheers,
Carl


--
Carl E. Anderson  mailto:cea@ncipher.com  http://www.ncipher.com/
nCipher Corporation Ltd.   +44 1223 723690   Fax: +44 1223 723601 


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