What a glorious rant about DocBook.

>

"In fact, the devastating quality of DocBook does not come as a surprise. It is essentially a design by committee product steered by big corporations: O'Reilly, AT&T, Sun, Novell, DEC, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi and many others. Bloat, redundancy, lack of attention to detail, portability nightmares, and lack of design and architecture are the natural and expected outcomes of such a situation. … So, the executive summary about DocBook is pretty simple: never use it for anything. …

This also made me laugh:

>

"However, for an input format that is as crappy as DocBook in the first place, we couldn't care less whether the input is valid or not. Also, erroring out was as hostile towards the user as we could possibly be: the poor guy already knows the input is in an undesirable format … They just want to get the damn text out of it no matter what. So why should we ever throw up on them? Even the worst kinds of violations of XML well-formedness should not hinder recovery of the text. … So i wrote the XML parser from scratch, in ISO C. It's now 180 lines of code grand total (function parse_file() in file parse.c). That probably took less time than figuring out how to write the glue code to integrate libxml2 or a similar library, and it's certainly simpler and more flexible. Needless to say, don't do that when you write your next web browser."

Ingo Schwarze, 2019-04-19
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20190419101505
via @Sandra