Fedora DTD?

[Thomas Jones]

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Hello all,

I have been playing with this idea and wanted to present it to the community 
with a request for comment:

With the increase in independence of Fedora from it's parent entity Redhat, I 
think there should be some formal declarations. These simple declarations are 
all in the realm of XML. This submission should/may provide a central 
document modeling scheme with respect to all documentation written prior to 
and thereafter.

Projected doctype declaration:
<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//Fedora Core//DTD DocBook XML V4.2-Based Subset 
0.1//EN"
               "http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/docs/dtd/fedorax.dtd"
                [...]>

I have quickly built up a DTD Driver for the Docbook 4.2 release. This driver 
contains declarations for Fedora Core specific documentation. 

Development location:
http://www.buddhalinux.com/xml/docbook/custom/fedoradtd/0.1.0/schema/dtd/fedorax.dtd

There are higher-level advantages to such approach:

 - Central repository for all elements to be utilized and/or deprecated. No 
more requesting help about an element. 

 - Element consistency. If an element is available, when you build your 
documentation instance against this DTD; it will proceed without error. If 
you attempt to build a document instance with an invalid element that is not 
available in the Document Model, you will be unable to build successfully.

- - Entity validation. Any entity can be added, altered, and removed from the
Document Model with minimal intrusion to the author(s).

- - Formal Definition of the FDP and its namespace. The FDP can be formally 
declared on all documentation. FDP document elements can then be included
with other namespace elements without error.

- - Architecture content. Declaration can be made for architecture specific 
content which can then be portrayed to the end-user via stylesheets.

- - Language declarations. Language translations can be included inline in 
sources by translators.

- - Fedora specific entities inclusion.

Most of all this document negates any of the inconsistencies found in the FDP 
documentation site. The site doesn't really provide guidance or 
recommendations for the markup of the documentation. With this DTD. there is 
no question as to what can and can't be utilized --- and in which way. 

I know that as a new author there were(still is) alot of ambiguities and 
problems with constructing documentation according to the editors and/or 
process. [Paul can vouch for this one!] ;)
Hopefully this may help the other newbie authors out there who want to help as 
well; but are hitting the same walls as I once did/am doing.

Thanks,
Thomas Jones
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