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OK, now I'm kinda curious about the tag minimization and why that's even
helpful. I've worked with both the SGML and XML versions of Docbook
and, from an authoring standpoint, they were almost identical. Granted,
we didn't pull any of the tricks that you suggest, but given that we
wanted the authors to make intelligent decisions about semantic markup
(such as tagging GUI elements, error messages, file names and
extensions, etc.), we didn't think it was such a hot idea to hide the
tags at all. I suppose we could have hidden such things as paragraph
tags, but why bother? Most folks learn to handle the tagging in pretty
short order.
Doing what you suggest with paragraphs is a lot like writing within a
WIKI. That kind of system drives me crazy. Fortunately, some WIKIs
allow you to escape to HTML, after which I sigh in relief and get to
work.
I do agree with you that SGML is rather nicer from a scripting
standpoint because the rules aren't so strict. Maybe it's simpler if
you use a homemade DTD or Schema and your authors are strictly
nontechnical, but when using a standard DTD or Schema, such as TEI,
Docbook, or DITA, I think they are pretty much the same from the
technical author's perspective.
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