Rainer Heilke wrote: > > Night owl? :) Thanks so much for these comments, I'm sick with a cold > > and have another deadline yet today, but just to address your format > > question quickly: > > The original contributor of this FAQ wants to keep this in wiki > > format, so others can always add to it and keep it a continual work in > > progress. Because this is focused for user audience, conversion to man > > pages isn't really a goal for this content. > > My apologies; I'm not doing well either. Must be the late summer > temperature swings. > > I agree with the original contributor that XML is not a suitable path.
Erm... "XML" would only be the "encoding" (like original HTML used "SGML" until it got messed-up by suers relying on "relaxed-syntax" parsers). The idea was to use DocBook which isn't more difficult to learn than HTML or the MediaWiki syntax and in many cases it's much more "effective" (except that you can't abuse tables for layout anymore etc.). > It requires too much up front for minor contributors, and will > effectively exclude them. Even some bigger contributors would be turned > away by this. Why do you thing that ? Users still have to lean the Wiki syntax which is very "messy" (I could use more strong language here about that xx@@@!!!...) and _not_ user-friendly if you want to do more complex things (like math or tables (and the table model in MediaWiki is IMO horrible broken)). > Having said that, I do understand some (many?) of the limits of a Wiki, > and this is why I agree that PDF and HTML output might be worthwhile > goals. If you list "HTML" in this case it would be a good idea to consider "DocBook", too (as source format, not as output format). In fact DocBook has huge advantages (e.g. seperation of layout and content, a better table model, a more fine-grained chapter system and options for automatic topic generation) over HTML > There is some possibility of providing these from the Wiki source > (though they would hardly be works of art). The problem there is that it > would be either a manual proocess, and would therefore always be a > little outdated, or a background script would be needed to generate said > output every time the Wiki is updated. What about running a background script every hour if the Wiki was updated ? ---- Bye, Roland -- __ . . __ (o.\ \/ /.o) roland.mainz at nrubsig.org \__\/\/__/ MPEG specialist, C&&JAVA&&Sun&&Unix programmer /O /==\ O\ TEL +49 641 7950090 (;O/ \/ \O;)
