Simon P. Lucy wrote:
> At 00:20 08/01/2001 +0000, James Green wrote:
[ snip ]
> There already are gateways for cvs available with and without secure access.
Good. What we need is something that can work within the mozilla.org
setup. Those who want to see this happen, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] who's
interested in seeing such a thing, and keep the rest of us informed of
your progress/outcome. It will be interesting to see if this actually
results in something that gets used heavily or not.
>> 2) The above also goes for the SGML/DocBook people. I just spoke to
>> Dawn Endico who says that making everyone use DocBook is out of the
>> question, but if parts of the site were available in such a form it
>> would be great (obvious rationale there).
[ snip ]
> I'm trying to understand what out of the question means. I can
> understand not all authors/contributors being willing to hack a DTR for
> their document, I can understand a little less that they wouldn't be
> able to insert <chapter> </chapter> tags and the like but I don't
> understand incorporating content (regardless of the structure used),
> without it conforming to a single recognised and supported structure.
Putting a little more context into what she was saying, I believe the
problem was getting the document authors (of which many are outside
contributors) to all use the same thing. Getting them all to use
Composer is not easy (choice of editor is a very personal thing), but
getting them all to use DocBook would be nigh-on impossible, at least
initially.
If initial work were done on getting the site into DocBook format, and a
mechanism found that kept everything up-to-date, even getting authors tp
use DocBook, that wasn't time consuming and doesn't involve everyone
using special software that may or may not run in their environment,
then there's a possibility that all authors could See The Light and
start *wanting* to use DocBook. Of course, if everybody did use DocBook,
how would new contributors get involved?
Like I said, I'm not throwing the idea out of the window, but afaict
Dawn shares my opinion that DocBook isn't implementable since the
authors would have to change their ways too much. If a middle-layer army
of convertors was available to do html->docbook conversion then it too
would have to prove that it could work in a timely and accurate manner
that didn't piss the authors off. Remember, authors expect their work to
be put on line, not converted into DocBook and lose or change
presentational effects.
> If there is no codifying of the content then the documentation is still
> going to be an unholy mess.
You have a better idea? Bring a workable DocBook or alternative solution
to the table, and I'm sure we'll be more than happy to look at it. I
personally do not like the idea of storing out documentation in HTML
either, it present many archectural problems, but until everyone who
produces the documentation is happy to change the system, it stays (imo).
James Green
