[RFC] Towards translatable entities

[Paul W. Frields]

On Fri, 2006-02-24 at 14:29 -0600, Tommy Reynolds wrote:
> Uttered "Paul W. Frields" <stickster at gmail.com>, spake thus:
> 
> > Might I suggest a fourth possibility (one which I'm not sure will work,
> > and is therefore inherently less cool than what Tommy has done)?
> > 
> > 4)  Provide a custom DTD to be used for all docs files, which references
> > an i18n tree somewhere in docs-common/common, for instance.  This would
> > "wrap" the DTD for our preferred DocBook (looks like V4.4 currently) and
> > provide general ("parsed"?) entities for each language.  
> 
> I considered this step.  
> 
> I also remembered there have been discussions (or requests) about FDP
> having its own DTD, perhaps an official subset of some DocBook
> version.  The idea has been rejected before because we don't want to
> document and support a custom DocBook DTD version.

I think we could easily draw the line at not customizing the DTD beyond
providing some general entities, same as we do now with an include.
That way there's no conflict, since DocBook stays DocBook.

> We are having enough trouble recruiting XML authors; I think having
> the appearance of our own DTD would steepen the learning curve when
> we should be flattening it.  And also lessen the document reuse
> portability.

I think the difference is trivial, but...

> And then we'll get into the "it would be so neat to have
> <fdp-element-foo>" added to the wrapper discussions...  

...on the other hand, having to fight this battle constantly would suck.
It would be so easy to succumb to the Dark Side...

> So I disregarded this approach and opted for the "virtual file"
> concept that very closely matches the other building infrastructure.

OK, I can live with that.

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
 Fedora Documentation Project: http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/docs/
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