Re: Re: Documantation Format

On Sunday, Aug 3, 2003, at 09:58 America/Chicago, Eric Merritt wrote:

> --- In [email protected], Simon Chappell <simon@s...>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Friday, Aug 1, 2003, at 16:40 America/Chicago, Eric Merritt
> wrote:
>>
>>>> I'm totally agreeable -- it should be somewhat ubiquitous and
> easy
>>>> for everyone to read, modify and work with.  Tex may be too
> complex,
>>>> sell me on why Tex would be better than docbook and why docbook
>>>> would be better than plain text with an HTML/XML analog.
>>>
>>>  You can't parse semantically significant portions of a plain
> text
>>> document. What
>>> part is the title, what part is the first section, who is the
> author?
>>> You just can't
>>> easily pull this type of information from plain text. You need to
> be
>>> able to do this to
>>> manage your documents and *realistically* convert them to
> html/pdf/etc.
>>> Thats the benifit of docbook.
>>
>> Actually, the Python crew have a concept called STX (Structured
> Text)
>> that is very suitable for the documentation needs that you have.
> I'm
>> half way through writing a Ruby implementation of stx2html, so I
> know
>> that it can produce markup languages (and therefore DocBook) as
> it's
>> output.
>
>  Do you have any good info links?

I'll dig them out. I first heard of STX through looking at Plone, a 
system written in Python running on top of Zope.

>
>>
>> As one who has maintained websites and documentation in pure HTML,
> I
>> would not relish maintaining documentation in DocBook as the source
>> format.
>>
>> Simon
>
>  Actually, with the right tools its quite easy. I have maintained a
> *large* documentation repository in docbook in the past. It was
> actually a pleasure compared to other formats.
>
>  Remember that docbook is *not* html, not even close.

True, but I run fairly minimalist on tools, so if it's hard to maintain 
in a text editor, it's hard to maintain. [I spend the money I save on 
software on better hardware ... being an Apple Mac kinda guy].

Simon


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