Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] Relations with OMF

[Dan M. <da...@ea...>]

On Fri, 27 Apr 2001, Eric Bischoff wrote:

> Speaking about this, one of the concerns at KDE was "how do we extract OMF 
> data out of our docbook files?". We did not wish to store the OMF 
> meta-information in a separate file. So the idea so far is:
> - to automatically extract DocBook meta-information which has OMF equivalent
> - to store OMF meta-information which has no DocBook equivalent (like the 
> position in the categories tree) in the DocBook file, using XML namespace to 
> differentiate it from plain DocBook, then to extract this information as well.

In the long term, I think we want to have the OMF elements added to
DocBook.  (You may recall that Norman Walsh thought this was a good idea
at the O'Reilly Summit.)  This way authors would only maintain one
file.  For the sake of maintaining databases and such, we may still
generate OMF files, but that is not of significance to the document
authors.

Before we can do this right, we have to stablize ScrollKeeper and the OMF
DTD to some extent.  Then we need to have the new tags added to
DocBook.   This takes a while, so I was planning on just using seperate
OMF files in the interim.

Your suggestion of adding tags which have their own namespace inside of a
DocBook document is interesting.  If we did this, would the document still
be a valid DocBook document which can be parsed by any standard DocBook
tool?  My impression was that it would not, but you know much more about
this than I do.  Or perhaps I am misundestanding what you mean.

Dan