Long, long ago, we did the arduous conversion from HTML to XML for our
documentation format, and the benefit was enormous and immediate - well
worth the effort.
Now, ten years later (at least) Docbook/XML is no longer quite as
popular as it once was, and I wonder to what extent it is stifling
contribution to the documentation process - in particular, translation.
At the moment we have *one* translation (French) which is maintained,
and everything else is woefully behind. See
http://people.apache.org/~takashi/translation-status/test.html#trunk I
wonder if it's because the initial setup to translate a document is just
so big.
And so I was wondering, if the time has come to consider moving to
another format, or, perhaps inserting another format into the existing
toolchain. eg., using Pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) or
similar to go Markdown -> Docbook and then from there use our current
toolchain. Or possibly convert entirely to Markdown (or asciidoc -
http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/ or rst -
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html) and build a new conversion chain.
While the initial effort to make this move would be substantial, I feel
that the benefits would be enormous in terms of getting new
contributors, and new translators, for the documentation effort.
Thoughts?
--
Rich Bowen - rbo...@rcbowen.com - @rbowen
http://apachecon.com/ - @apachecon
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