DocBook容易使用吗？

Dan Moniz 首先持反对意见：那是地狱，他们说了慌。

They Lied to Us

Norman Walsh 当然是持赞同观点了。

XML Interop, DocBook, and Ease of Use

Dan Moniz says no: I've been spending three weeks in XML hell.

In and amongst all my other work duties, I've been trying to develop a single-source XML based document publishing toolchain. A "solution", if you will, that will allow me to write documents in a layout-agnostic way based on document structure that can then be processed and published to whatever format I want or need: PDF, Microsoft Word, HTML, etc.

I'm surprised at the lack of integration and easy-to-use tools that seems to exist in the XML authoring world. I would have thought that by now, someone would have put together a package that approaches the sort of Microsoft Word/Corel WordPerfect model of authoring, but XML based, say with DocBook, but it doesn't seem to have been done. High-quality Windows-native XML editors with an authoring/publishing focus (as opposed to an IDE model) are rare, and I haven't found a free or open source editor yet that's reasonably feature complete. Once you have the editor, you still have to piece together an amazing amount of individual software and configuration details to put together a toolchain.

Norman Walsh says yes: Dan points out, fairly I think, that there’s been a lot of hype about the benefits of XML and how easy it’s going to make things. If you believe all that hype, the first few weeks in the trenches must be a real shock.

I’m trying to decide if I’ve contributed to that hype. I’m not sure. XML authoring, and DocBook authoring in particular, are easy by some metrics. For example, I do it in a free editor. By that metric, Word is extremely hard for me. I’d have to change operating systems ($$$) and buy the application ($$$). (Yes, I could use OpenOffice, in fact, I do sometimes, but that’s not really the point.)

The point is it depends on your metrics. It is dead easy for me to publish an essay like this one in HTML and PDF, and to syndicate it in RSS and Atom, and to generate metadata that can be queried. I could easily generate other forms as well.