On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 12:09:45AM +0100, Philipp Gr?schler wrote: > Philipp Gr?schler schrieb: > > In the course of the current Mini Summit I spent the afternoon hacking > > on a (yet still) small XSLT file whose purpose will be the conversion of > > Monotone's Texinfo Documentation to a set of multiple files which can be > > used for the Wiki. > > .... > > I just committed the first release of this thing, in a very *pre-alpha* > state.
I saw the commits before this thread, and was curious what you were up to. Alas, I missed the mini-summit this time. But - excellent! As far as output format goes, mdwn or others can be deal with by ikiwiki. The limitations there are around some of the more specific semantic markup: noting that this represents a command, or an option, or a literal vs a variable, and getting this information through to the point where CSS can render it with visual distinctions. Markdown offers some basic notations, and the opportunity to revert to html elements for more detailed cases, but this can be a little disruptive as a document author writing a wiki page (it's a sudden shift from minimal to more extensive internal markup). That is much less an issue if, at least in the first phases, we're talking about keeping the source in texinfo and rendering to something that ikiwiki can consume to produce a better-integrated output on the website (indexing, etc). These are good examples of the discontinuity, by the way, because many of these element types native to texinfo are focused on software documentation, where markdown is more focused on general writing. Longer term, we need to develop a strategy for more unified documentation. That may involve changing the markup source for some components, and potentially integrating your work into ikiwiki (allowing it to read essentially another markup input language). It almost certainly involves unifying the stylesheet, both in terms of the output rendering and the selection of styles available. It also would involve allowing the creation of narrative navigaton paths through the page collection, both as a reading guide online and to structure the generation of offline formats (e.g. PDF output of documents similar to the current manual, in an organised sequence of chapters and sections). This means we'll have pages on the site intended for differnet purposes, generated from a number of mechanisms (including automatic aggregation via some of ikiwiki's tricks), and potentially from sources in different markup styles. The great thing about this work is it (begins to) breaks the coupling between purpose and style, which means content can be used for multiple purposes regardless of style, in turn meaning that "unification" doesn't get confused with "markup conversion". So, really, yay, and yay again. -- Dan.
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