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Comment by lemming | Hacker News Reader

I agree this is very unusual. It's also somewhat annoying, for example I can't just send this to my Kindle to read it, and I can imagine other tools failing on this as well.

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Which is more the fault of the Kindle than the authors. It's Docbook, a standard that was invented for the purpose of writing books.

It's great to use DocBook for writing books! (Actually, I don't think this is true for most books, but you do you.) But I would argue that processors that are designed to take HTML as input are not at fault for failing to process non-HTML documents. (Many, but not all) web browsers can render and style XML like this, but I'd argue that this is -- somewhat ironically given the article's subject -- probably not the best approach to putting DocBook files on the web.

The only way to build a fully conformant browser is to support rendering HTML as SGML with a DTD. Toy/specialty renderers skip over that step since you can assume 99.9999% of web documents will be HTML. However, they would completely fall apart on standard SGML, styled XML, etc.

Writing good software is hard I guess :)

I just tried it on Pocket, and it keeps switching me to the web version... which is a bit frustrating, since the source code / DocBook [1] XML format looks ideal for describing a Pocket article.

Seems DocBook has been around since 1999, judging from when the first O'Reilly book was published about it [2].

I just flagged it with the Pocket app's "Report An Article Display Problem" feature, but it is such a niche use case that I can't imagine them spending time on it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook

[2] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/docbook/book/docbook.html

Kindle will probably take it away from you anyway.

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