On Friday 05 January 2001 16:14, James Green scratched this in the dirt:
> How do people using only Netscape/Mozilla Composer to produce their
> pages, and get these saved html pages into DocBook format without
> needing any further tools or knowledge or in fact effort?
Heh Heh, that's the kicker. The way Linuxdoc.org has gotten around that is
to ask people to submit documentation in whatever medium is convenient, then
have a staff of volunteers convert the file into DocBook. It's worked so
far, for hundreds of HOWTO and Guide documents.
> If anyone knows how to do an HTML file upload, then conversion to
> DocBook on the server, then speak up.
That seems like a pretty silly idea, but I'm guessing you knew that :)
HTML doesn't have correct "typing" of items -- there's no way to tell if that
H2 is the beginning of a chapter, or what, except by attempting to infer from
context. It's mostly presentation, and precious little data typing.
> Sigh. Why isn't this proving to be a simpler problem to understand and
> solve? DocBook sounds great as a storage medium, but how the heck do you
> get into DocBook in the first place...
The easiest way to do DocBook is to have an editor which supports SGML or
XML. There are some commercial plugins for MS word which support it, Adobe
Framemaker supports it... I personally use PSGML mode in Emacs to write my
docs, but that's a pretty geeky way to do it (kinda' like writing HTML in a
validating text editor).
The key issue there, though, is people have gotten used to the idea of
"What you see is what you get" rather than "what you see is what you mean".
Once you've passed that stumbling block, and get people to understand that
they need to define the type of text they are putting in, not how it's
supposed to look, the rest is cake.
Many HTML people understand this instinctively, because HTML can be defined
as simply an SGML DTD...
My suggestion: Get a group of volunteers who will do DocBook conversions.
Anybody who understands HTML can easily understand DocBook. It's pretty
trivial to convert most documentation, but the decisions on how to convert
need to be made by a human, not a machine, because tagging semantics differ
according to author preference.
I volunteer to be the first volunteer. Get at least two more people and a
submission mailing list, and you are in business.
--
Matthew P. Barnson Manager, Systems Administration
Excite@Home [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"There is no spoon" -- Neo
