> >Do you really think we will find long-term volunteers to do the extremely
> >tedious job of accepting documents in whatever forms you allow, converting
> >them to this XML dialect, just to watch them get converted back to HTML
> >again?
>
> You've already had two volunteers and the display of documents has very
> little to do with the management of the structure so I don't see why anyone
> would care, that's a little like saying that database administrators have
> their feelings hurt if someone produces a report. The work isn't lost, its
> used.
>
> >Simon, I don't want to be rude, but there is not a snowball's chance that
> >we will go down this route. Among other criteria, we are looking for:
> >
> >1) Relative ease of deployment - everyone is busy
>
> Using structured markup is no harder if the work is segmented
> properly. Over time authors may learn the minimal amount of tags required
> to structure their own documents but it isn't necessary. There are two
> volunteers already.
You do realise that there are something like 10,000 legacy documents on
mozilla.org you'd have to convert?
Also, if someone wants to write something and whack it up there, to meet a
need, they'd be a bit annoyed if they had to send it off to someone to do
a conversion first. Particularly if that person was on holiday.
> >2) Low barriers to document contribution
>
> Providing plain text seems a very low barrier, far lower than requiring the
> use of a particular tool.
It isn't, because are used to contributing website content with HTML
editors.
> After all that is what we have now
> and the result is a mess, continuing in the same way will only produce a
> different mess later on.
The mess we have currently is not the fault of the way we mark up the
content. :-)
> >It fails all of these. If I suggested to [EMAIL PROTECTED] that what
> >www.mozilla.org needs is for us to write an entire document-handling
> >system based around an invented XML dialect for document description,
> >their reaction would be... interesting.
>
> I haven't suggested anything like that and any way I think I've shown that
> it meets all of the above criteria.
Maybe I've misunderstood your proposal. You want all documents for the
website to be submitted as, or converted by volunteers to, your XML format
(or DocBook.) You then want them converted (either on the fly, or
once-only) to HTML for sending to browsers. You also want to write all the
necessary site management tools to deal with all this stuff.
Furthermore, you want us to throw away any possibilities of using any of
the myriad of currently-written tools, such as search indexers, that work
with HTML content. We also can't use a database because, again, they are
all based around the idea that you use HTML.
> You might think it entirely pointless
> but as other documentation projects solve the same problems in similar
> ways,
The mozilla.org website is not (except in some parts) a documentation
project in the same way that linuxdoc.org is. If you ask them, I very much
doubt they have their website pages originally written as anything other
than some form of HTML.
Gerv
