Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale

@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.

@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.

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!)

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.