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2. Introduction

The principle of any sgml'ed document (linuxdoc, docbook, html) is more or less the same:

Don't write how it should look like, but write what it is.

This is a different approach than the standard "wysiwyg"

What you see is what you (should) get (if you are a very lucky one and your computer wins the war against buggy software)
one. You do not tell the programm that this line should be in a bigger font, for looking like a headline. The thing you do is telling that this line is a headline. You do not try to make your document look like a report, but you tag it to be a report.

The big advantages of this approache are:

  1. You do not need to mess arround with fontsetting, line gaps or anything directly connected to the layout.
  2. You describe your document in a more abstract way so it's more reusable and can be mapped to different media types.
    If you ever tried the reuse a document written in a specialized wysiwy layout for a html document you know what I'm talking about.


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