BTW, it's consistent... (w/o an 'a').
What flavor of DocBook is OOo planning to use: 4.1.2 (what Writer "has,"
so to speak), 4.5 the final version with a normative DTD, or the
two-year old 5.0 (w/o a normative DTD, or a complete DTD, BTW)?
After that choice is made, any DocBook document still needs to be
formatted, as DocBook merely determines the document's XML
structure--not its eventual displayed format. Is there any OOo project
still functioning that has anything beyond a partially complete DocBook
4.1.2 implementation?
If anybody wants a DocBook 4.5 or DocBook 5.x templates, I could do a
Structured FrameMaker implementation of them as I already produced the
FrameMaker EDD files from the DocBook 4.5 and 5.0 DTDs, although Norman
Walsh never completed the DTD for the current DocBook 5.0 two years ago.
FrameMaker should be far better than what OOo could do as far as DocBook
is concerned because OOo is literally years behind Adobe FrameMaker in
any such DocBook implementation, IMO.
Gary
Clayton wrote:
ok, I've understood that it has not been a technical reason to give the
wiki a try but community involvement. It's good to keep this in mind.
That is the one thing I really find important as well. The more
community involvement we have, the better. :-)
But with the User Guides - did you experience a higher contribution
activity up to now? As far as I've seen the English Guides have been in
the wiki for quite a year now?
I haven't been monitoring them as closely as the Dev, Admin and Basic
guides. Jean is in a better spot to comment on them.
Sorry, I've never been using it so I did not know the skill level
needed.
It's not impossible :-) and someone familiar with raw HTML, or XML will
find DocBook to be understandable. Basically DocBok IS XML.
But in docbook the filters already exist for several output formats. And
they are maintained by others. With ODT, hasn't all this to be
generated again? (just a question)
Yes DocBook is very versatile. You can transform it into many different
end formats. One of the outputs we have in the Wiki Collections is
DocBook by the way.
Another present concern is that the wiki in it's actual structure is not
very attractive to end users. It is not very usable. Main issues are
IMHO: it serves for several purposes spread too wide apart (development
and community and end user documentation), search cannot be restricted
to one language (or e.g. one version or one purpose), and some of the
pages are of questionable quality or even "trial pages". Good end user
documentation has to be very clearcut and clean, it is measured by its
usability. And only a good, promising set-up attracts people. So the
goal "community involvement" seems to be foiled to a certain extent by
the suboptimal realization.
I agree completely.. the structure is poor. Some of that is due to
choices and decisions made when the Wiki was originally set up - one
that haunts us for the multi language thing is the lack of namespaces.
The original wiki was setup as a single namespace for reasons that made
sense at the time. Now that the Wiki has grown and the number of
languages in use has exploded, we are seeing the side effects of that
choice... something that was not foreseen or considered years ago.
Switching now to Namespaces is close to impossible without starting a
totally new Wiki and moving pages over. That's a huge job...
IF the language specific pages are set up with the ISO name in the URL
and are _consistant_ then you can set up a custom Google search for
those language specific subpages. For example if the DE group has all
the German pages under /wiki/DE/pagename then the Google search can be
set to index and return results just for the DE subpages. I can set
this up (requires a custom Wiki extension for each language)
One thing that would help... is a shuffle of some of the pages - for
example, the Devguide could use some re-work to put some of the pages
into a more readable state.
Another thing we could consider is FlaggedRevs - this flaggs pages as
reviewed/not-reviewed. Pages that are validated and correct are marked
as such.. pages not reviewed are also clearly marked. There are a few
issues with implementing this extension - but it's worth considering.
Wikipedia is starting to use it, and the MediaWiki Wiki uses it.
C.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@documentation.openoffice.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@documentation.openoffice.org
