>
> Hiya Mike,
>
> I agree that this is a very interesting and important question for the
> Docs community. Let's go for it! Will you help us to beta a system on
> opensolaris.org, or genunix.org for this purpose?
>
> I copy Brendan, Ben, Al, and Eric as customers, contributors, and doc
> community leaders who are eager to help us develop mechanisms on genunix
> or opensolaris to further the cause of documentation that is easy to
> edit, bug-free, up-to-date, and still meets reader expectations for PDF.
> Can any of you guys help us out? Case of good beer to any takers :)
Of course: I would be happy to help beta-test anything we think might
help in this area, and I know the others folks you've cc'ed would do.
> Currently, I just don't have tools to capture changes from a wiki that
> meet 508, PDF, and license requirements, so my plan for the doc and man
> page consolidations was to deliver the SolBook XML in a hg repo using
> the opensolaris project functionality. Thoughts?
My concern around XML is purely ease of editing, particularly for
lowering the barrier to community contributions. And by that I not only
mean ease of editing as in having a WYSIWYG editor, but also the idea that
it's too difficult for most people to learn all the tags, and most of them
aren't needed anyway (I think for the DTrace and MDB guides, totalling
close to 800 pages of content, we used no more than about 20 tags).
I want to see a very simple way to create content without being a DTD
wizard. The *content* is the value -- right now we're letting the
process requirements cripple our ability to empower the broadest
possible audience to create content, and that is what I want to see fixed.
I would strongly suggest investigating either:
(a) wiki software that can store the data in docbook XML as the
underlying representation, or
(b) wiki software that provides enough of a structure in its underlying
representation for a script to extract that data as docbook XML
That doesn't mean you throw out your other requirements, but rather
find a way to meet them within this new paradigm for content creation.
-Mike
--
Mike Shapiro, Solaris Kernel Development. blogs.sun.com/mws/
