Current project number, um, 8?

[zwol@masto.hackers.town]

Current project number, um, 8? involves DocBook. Never had to do that before. Am now wondering just how much of the hate for XML, that I remember from the early 2010s, is down to the incredible shittiness of the tools for working with XML.

[jannem@fosstodon.org]

@zwol
I used LaTeX throughout university. I never found XML significantly more cumbersome.

[zwol@masto.hackers.town]

seriously, I blew this entire afternoon trying to pin down an xmllint error whose cause turned out to have absolutely nothing to do with the error messages it was giving me.

(Actual error: multiple elements with the same xml:id. Error message: "<chapter> not expected as child of <book>" or words to that effect.)

(Giving sensible error messages for multiply defined symbols is a compilers 101 exercise!)

[zwol@masto.hackers.town]

@jannem Yeah, like, considered as a thing-in-itself apart from the tools, the major complaint I have about DocBook is that the documentation of _how to write a book using DocBook_ is inadequate.

Many people have very similar complaints about LaTeX.

[swelljoe@mas.to]

@zwol I wrote a book in Docbook (SGML first, and then converted to XML later) about 25ish years ago, with a custom vim configuration. It wasn't pleasant. Yes, the tools were bad, but also it's just really sort of tiring looking at all the tags and the processing toolchain was dire.

I was using a LaTeX-based toolchain for the PDF generation, I don't remember details, but Sebastian Rahtz was super helpful when I ran into mysterious issues.

I wouldn't do it again. Different time, different me.

[zwol@masto.hackers.town]

@swelljoe I completely agree that it becomes tiring looking at all the tags. Not sure I've ever seen a markup language that was both semantic and pleasant to read in source form, though.

[swelljoe@mas.to]

@zwol at this point I'd forego semantic, and just take easy and nice to look at. If I were writing a book today, I'd author it in Markdown, and then convert it to...whatever...for editing, or whatever at the very end. Before publishing, I ended up converting to an OpenOffice doc with the publishers template for editing, anyway (but I didn't originally write it to be published, it just worked out that way, so the OpenOffice step wasn't originally in the plans).