XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

OpenOffice

While you can write markup by hand in a text editor, many non-programmers prefer a friendlier, more WYSIWYG approach. There’s no reason a standard word processor can’t save its data in XML, and indeed several now do, including Microsoft Word 2003 and OpenOffice.org Writer. Harold also wrote a much smaller book in XML using OpenOffice.org Writer (Effective XML, Addison Wesley).

Tip

For what it’s worth, in hindsight I regret that decision. If I were doing it again, I would write the XML by hand in DocBook as I did with Processing XML with Java, rather than using OpenOffice. As much as good GUI tools can improve productivity, bad GUI tools can hinder it. A poorly designed GUI is no guarantee of ease of use.Scott and I wrote this book in Microsoft Word, but mostly because the early editions predated the availability of high-quality XML publishing tools. That decision is hurting us now. For instance, the complicated tables in Chapter 27 are well beyond what Word can comfortably handle. In DocBook, they’d be a no-brainer. If we were starting from scratch, we’d write in DocBook.

Example 6-3 shows a fairly simple OpenOffice document. Again, the content comes from the book you’re reading now. This differs from TEI and DocBook in several ways—for instance, it uses namespaces. TEI and DocBook don’t. The title of the book and the names of the authors are not included because they’d normally be stored in a separate XML document containing only the metadata. Indexes and tables of contents ...