In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Havoc Pennington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On 29 Nov 1998, Adam Di Carlo wrote:
>> Docbook *doesn't* meet our needs. It does meet the need for >> tables (CALS model) and figures and all that, more or less. >> >> . docbook is way to scary for newbies. >> >> . docbook doesn't support texinfo or ASCII or NROFF output. >> >> . even then we'd have a lot of work ahead of us to extend docbook, >> i.e., the <package> tag, etc., etc. Volunteer? >> > If we feel these things are important, we can't ever use DocBook for > debian docs, even if it does have some features DebianDoc lacks. > At least, from the perspective of the tutorial: I need the texinfo > output, other people will demand ASCII, and frankly DocBook seems > awfully scary to me even though I've written some stuff in it. (It's > just plain annoying to type <emphasis> instead of <em> for example, > and the tags are very API-docs centric, not book-centric). > There's no point avoiding one set of disadvantages only to get > another. I don't think you've really grasped what a Formal Architecture would buy us. We could *translate* from Docbook to debiandoc.dtd in a (theoretically) lossless format. We would be DTD agnostic. Since the DTDs (at this particular point int time) are bound to a formatting engine (debiandoc.dtd with Perl/sasp, docbook with DSSSL/jade), we could exploit the benefits of both. Of course it's all vapor until someone does it, but, please, don't knock it until you at least understand it. -- .....Adam Di [EMAIL PROTECTED]<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
