Le 29 mars 04, � 16:32, Brian McCallister a �crit :
On Mar 25, 2004, at 8:57 AM, Bertrand Delacretaz wrote:
I don't know what kind of energy and time you have, but If you feel like creating a better infrastructure for our docs it'd sure be welcome. Many great ideas have been floating around but it's still stuck at the ideas stage at the moment.
Well... the docs have good content, and good formatting, and these are well seperated, but navigating and finding things is tough...
Same feelings here.
Probably the hierarchy and flow of the documentation needs to be abstracted from the content and look-and-feel. Looking through documentation can be modeled as navigating a graph of tangentially related elements, and, as Stefano recently pointed out, RDF models graphs.
I think even a simple dynamic navigation system based on keywords ("sitemap" "generators" "FileGenerator" etc) and document types ("reference" "tutorial" etc) would be much better than what we have now.
Maybe we need a system for handling arbitrary RDF based element graphs and building navigational constructs based on the mappings. The constructs could be output to XML and formatted somehow into a navigable structure (maybe transformed into Perl and presented as a windows-help style app). Doing this in a performant manner may require static compilation, but I suspect an optimized system allowing dynamic compilation of the data can be done -- possibly using a Flower Pot metaphor for the design.
But the question is: who will water the flowers then ;-)
...If only there were a good tool around designed to abstract the content, look and feel, and user interface elements of documentation....
Hmm..I might be able to help in selecting a tool...but, similar to the Flower Pot problem, the question is: who is going to work the tool ;-)
-Brian (with tongue firmly in cheek)
- Bertrand (similar mood in the second half)
