A simpler, kinder framework for academic work

[TimP]

I'm a little frustrated by the scale and complexity of docbook, and especially it's unsuitability for academic work in the humanities and social sciences. I'm a computer guy of 35 years with lots of xml authoring experience, but minimal design and transformation experience - and I don't have time to learn all of this in my "spare" time. If my job required that I learn it, that'd be another matter entirely, but there are only so many hours to go around.

Anyway, I've found a reasonable little DTD for authoring small to hefty works that has only about 80 elements in it, as opposed to the hundreds in docbook. (It's called tbook.) It needs a bit of expansion to handle academic-style references (the ones in docbook are, academically speaking, ridiculous) and then some serious xsl to transform it into the major formats acceptable for the social sciences, namely APA (http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/), MLA (http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/01/)and, perhaps, Chicago.

We've got this fabulous wysiwyg xml editor here that the developers sell at severe discounts to academics; it only make sense that it would help everyone to provide some attention to the specific authoring needs of academics. With an academically-oriented framework on board, I can't but imagine that there would be a serious market improvement for oxygen, especially with a bit of advertising. I could probably do some of the schema work (mostly since I understand the feature needs) but I don't have time to learn enough xslt and css to do the rest. I'm looking for a collaborator who eats XSLT for breakfast and, perhaps another who gets his or her kicks from wrestling with CSS.

Any takers? I would spec it out if anyone is interested.

[sorin_ristache]

Hello,

Did you look at the Simplified DocBook schema? It has a reduced set of elements and the existing DocBook stylesheets can be used (and customized) for generating output like PDF, HTML, etc.


Regards,
Sorin

[TimP]

Yes, I did consider "simplified" docbook. While fewer elements might seem to be less daunting a prospect for new adopters, docbook is not just large but structurally complex. For example, most (normal) people would think that <blockquote> is just an indentation start/stop tag that contains paragraphs. In docbook, it's necessarily a sub-element of <para> with <para>s inside - paragraphs within paragraphs is not very friendly. And that's just one little example.

Another thing, simplified docbook only supports articles, which necessarily means a single, monolithic structure. Academics write books all the time, which means its important to be able to partition the source logically and physically. I don't know if tbook offers physical partitioning; that would, perhaps, be one of the embellishments necessary. Size should not induce complexity.

Finally, it's true that the style sheets can be customized. I've messed around with them a bit myself. However, the docbook style sheets, as powerfully parameterized as they are to induce maximum flexibility, are incomprehensible to people who find these non-procedural markup languages challenging. The simple differences between the various adaptations of academic formats are easily enumerated and could be accommodated nicely in an academic-oriented style sheets system - not just a reduction of the docbook style sheets but a re-rationalization for manipulation by mortals.